I've been pretty quite lately - job change plus other changes have had me pretty heads down. I've started into a new position where we're in the middle of a 1.0 product release - the benefits of testing approaches are always so apparent at these times. I'm spending the morning the catching up on email but thought I'd take a break to talk about one new testing product I've been using and I've come to rely on - ANTS Load.
ANTS Load by Red-Gate software allows for the creation of VB.NET scripts to call webservices. I asked about using C# for scripts, but the Microsoft .Net for Applications they licensed from Microsoft only supports VB.NET. It's too bad that Microsoft limits the language to VB.NET - I'll bet the shipping bits for C# exist in the tool, MS has just disabled them. I really hope MS changes that strategy.
While you can also call web pages with ANTS Load, I am ignoring that capability for the time being - our product has a significant number of webservices being exposed publicly. ANTS Load allows me to create scripts for calling the webservices and really do anything I deem fit. I can then configure the load files to run in various configurations - very slick. Being able to light up the test environment and stress test it is very useful - and properly designing your tests to allow for effective test runs is important. ANTS Load can similate a wide range of clients from a single box and the enterprise version allows you to coordinate multiple boxes in providing a larger testbed.
From my pespective, if you're doing anything with webservices take some time and check out this tool.
I'll be blogging more about this going forward.