Tooling

SoakIE – a Web Server Stress Tool with a twist

Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based – the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.

CogniScale - virtual hosting made easy

We’ve not been talking much about it and that’s partially my fault as well (busy with other projects), but Cognifide has a really cool initiative called Cognifide Labs that we intend to grow over time. The plan is to devote up to 10% company time into side projects that help us grow expertise and allow our devs to dwell into interesting technologies, methodologies and languages and develop their skills.

One of the first projects (that I took part in) is CogniScale - an app that allows FlexiScale users to manage their servers. Here’s the story…

Misadventures with Database Engine Tuning Advisor

I’ve been on a sole task today to improve a database performance of the project we’ve been working on. As much as I enjoyed the task there is one thing that costed me quite a bit of head scratching. Being a standard nerd I usually have about 20-30 applications running on my machine at a time, I didn’t immediately associated the error with the tuning advisor but rather assumed it’s one of my other 29 applications/servers/daemons/services in background did something stupid, probably even some of my code craving for a bit of attention, right? So I moved to tune the database on the server via remote desktop, but when I hit a wall there I’ve looked around for the solution and it looks like that it’s been known to MS for almost 2 years now.

Working with multiple IIS/EPiServers on XP (switching-speed-em-uppers)

Since IIS on XP seems to be handling only one site at a time and I have multiple installations of EpiServer for different purposes on my machine I needed a fast way of switching between them. Sure I could go to the administration console and do it manually, but hey, why waste 30 seconds every time you do it when you can actually batch waste them in a chunk of half an hour to automate it. so here’s my findings. The adsutil.vbs is the script you want to get intalled on your system somewhere in the search path. %systemroot% will do. You will find the script on your XP CD in the \i386 folder. Unpack with the following command:

The Wiki Family

Writing user documents for our company, I ’ve been using our corporate wiki a lot recently. Confluence is incredible. I can honestly say I’ve not been impressed by a piece of software to that degree for quite a while. I really like how it provides me with the possibility for creating small pages like “format specifications” and “installation info” which I can then assemble into e.g. “User’s manual” simple and seamless:

Skype GeoLocation Tool

Download source files - 103 Kb Download the Skype Geo Location tool - 52 Kb

Introduction

It’s a real joy to work in a international company, the problem we face are hardly ever matched by some locally based endeavours… As some of our friends here at work, you may choose to reveal your current location to your skype buddies. This is nice and easy since you can just put it in your name or description and everyone will see where you are.This poses a problem should you really travel frequently, it is more likely than not, that your location tag will be out of sync. As this is a something that happens for them once in a while I found it an interesting concept, fun enough to be worth solving it :) So how does one establish his location? Short of installing a GPS on your machine, I would suggest checking your IP address and translating it based on one of the available databases. The thought process goes as follows… [Read about the technical guts of the application in my article at Code Project]

Turning any keyboard into a "slightly multimedia enabled one" in .Net

Most of us here use Pandora for the listening to the music with their headphones. The keyboards we have at the office do not have any sound volume adjusting keys. It’s mildly annoying that you need to take off your headphones every time someone talks to you or click the system tray every time the musinc is too quiet or too loud. But hey! What do we have CodeProject and Visual Studio for? Quick investigation on CP allows to determine that there is a way for a DotNet app to both control the system volume and hook the keyboard events fairly easily. Half an hour later… We have a little tray application for adjusting the system volume control The only visual indication of the app running is a tray icon. While it is running you can:

Linkage

I’ve done some research about Visual studio plugins recently, just so that I can close the tabs and move on here are some links that I cound to contain some useful information:

• HTML Code copy -Absolute must for any blogging .Net developer
• WatiN - Web applications testing in .Net - sounds like it might be THE framework for testing our web GUIs
• Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now
• Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Contest Winners
• Introduction to GhostDoc - really funny tool that needs to be looked at - might be useful…. moderately. Definitely genuine.
• CodeKeep - THE repository for storing and sharing code snippets
• Visual Studio Power toys pack installer
• Christopher Bennage lists some nice and worth mentioning tools as well
• Seems like an interesting sanbox for some cool development ideas
• FX Cop
• NCoverExplorer - test coverage tool
• This is not really a .Net stuff biut rather an IE Addon but a great one at that!

UpTime.Net

 1 PerformanceCounter pc = new PerformanceCounter("System", "System Up Time");
 2 
 3 //Normally starts with zero. do Next Value always.
 4 pc.NextValue(); 
 5
 6 TimeSpan ts = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(pc.NextValue());
 7
 8 MessageBox.Show(Environment.MachineName +
 9    " has been up for \n\n" +
10     (ts.Days < 1 ? "" : ts.Days + " days, ") +
11     (ts.Hours < 1 ? "" : ts.Hours + " hours, ") +
12     (ts.Minutes < 1 ? "" : ts.Minutes + " minutes ") +
13     " and " + ts.Seconds + " seconds.");

Nice, neat and simple. Get a compiled executable here

How to get Website Thumbnail in C#

[Edit: I’ve posted it on CodeProject and there are some greatl people commenting on it that did the investigation on ho to wrap it in a STA Thread and make it a part of your ASP.Net solution - really cool stuff!] An interesting use case. Darek (our beloved sys admin - we all bow to him and worship his skills) has recently asked if it’s possible to write a .net application to make a thumbnail of a website. Which is pretty trivial with Windows forms actually. All you really need to do is drop a WebBrowser on your form and once it’s loaded the page call:

New week, new toy

I’ve just found this cool app that allows you to post to blogs, including our own one.

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

go ahead and try it! I’m writing this article in it! As cool as WordPress is, it’s writing editor sucks. I don’t tend to write often, but when I start, my articles usually take more than a page and if in the process I accidentally press the shortcut for the browser go-back… I’m crying! I also wonder if you’ve ran into the 1000 miles long line bug in the WordPress editor? It seems to sometimes make all spaces in the line non breakable, there is a solution to this, which is to press enter and then go back to the line again and delete and re-insert all the spaces again… which makes me cry some more! I am also just not a big fan of Web interfaces for something so interactive as creating documents or calculations (hint, hint Google). I think Web is more suited for presentation whereas desktop is for creation.

ClickOnce

The new project is really exciting. Not that we didn’t expect that, the number of new technologies we get to explore is incredible.

I’ve just finished setting up an automatic build and deployment (of a desktop application) environment consisting of SVN+Nant+CruiseControl+ClickOnce. The system is centered around CruiseControl which detects any commit in the trunk in the SVN repository and every time it’s changed, it calls Nant to pull source code from our SVN, at which point it compiles the source into binary artifacts and put them up on our release server. This means that every time you change anything and commit it to the repository - a minute or two later - any tester can get a working copy of your build to look at, without any intervention on your part, but there’s more…

Learning C#

I’m about to help a few guys here with their transition from Java to .Net, namely to C#.  I thought it may actually be a good idea to gather a few helpful links together for you. Stuff I found useful while I was phasing into the joys of the .Net framework a while ago.

The official stuff

First and foremost C# is an ECMA regulated standard. And as such is pretty well documented. ECMA allows you to download PDF e-books regarding the standardized part of the language: