Showing posts of category: Patterns and Practices

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is shipping the next version of the popular ASP.NET MVC Framework with its IDE. A year ago I blogged about my findings when getting my hands on the first version of ASP.NET MVC. The MVC Framework provides really nice features that make it very easy to build web applications on [...]

Along with so many others I am stranded in Europe waiting for my flight back to the United States right now. The Volcano not only impacts flights across Europe but also impacts web sites of airports, airlines and travel agencies around the world. Checking my flight status on Sunday was almost impossible. The website of [...]

Lately I was checking out ShowSlow. The site is really great. It combines YSlow and PageSpeed metrics and visualizes them in a really nice way. When I clicked on the URLs Measured Tab I had to wait quite some time until the page finished downloading. While this page is really displaying a lot of information, [...]

In an earlier post I already discussed several approaches towards end-user experience (or performance) monitoring including their pros and cons. In this post I will present a simple real world sample which shows the limits of performance traceability in AJAX applications.
As I don’t like Hello World samples, I thought I’d rather build something a bit [...]

This time I take an a bit unconventional approach towards defining performance management. The idea for this post came through a number of customer engagements, where the same question came up over and over again: “How do we start with Application Performance Management and what should we do?” Over time I developed a simple model [...]

In my last two blog entries I wrote about how to Use BizTalk Performance Counters and how to Analyze Adapter and Pipeline Performance. In this final blog I focus on Orchestration and calling external services.
Step 4: Analyzing Orchestration
Orchestrations can be as simple as reading a file from a file system, transforming it and writing it [...]

Remark: The analysis in this blog was done on masters.com on March 24th 2010. By April 2nd 2010 masters.com was re-launched with a new look and feel. Some of the problems highlighted in this blog are still on the re-launched site. I will publish another blog analyzing the current site, compare it with the old [...]

One of my daily activities is checking interesting blog posts on various performance related topics. Today I stumbled across the blog 10 Cool Websites with Amazing jQuery Effects. I started looking at these pages which really have nice UI features implemented with jQuery. What many of these pages have in common is that they contain [...]

I had an interesting conversation with our Test Automation team lead Stefan – who Andi interviewed for our “Eating our own Dog Food ” article – on his experiences with the willingness of developers to write performance tests.
I asked a provocative question: do developers really want to write them in the first place? First he [...]

Visual Studio 2010 is almost here – Microsoft just released the first Release Candidate which looks pretty solid and good. Microsoft added new interfaces for performance management solutions like dynaTrace to extend the Web- and Load-Testing capabilities (check out Ed Glas’s blog on what’s in VSTS Load Testing) to go beyond .NET environments and deeper [...]