One of the important aspect of entire software development cycle is Quality Assurance or QA. QA in itself is becoming so vast and huge it has multiple facets and need great tools to manage those aspects.

If you check out a decade back QA was more of the rudimentary test cycle performed without any science. As the entire world of software evolved it has become more and more science with all law of necessity.

One of the important aspects of QA is Test Planning which involves planning, designing,execution and analysis of test cases. This entire cycle requires automation and their are various Test Case Management tools available in the market. One of them Nuevosoft. I got this presentation and thought of sharing with all my readers just check to see if this really helps in providing an efficient software solution to the world.

Check about this Nuevosoft website.

Slideshare PResentation about VS 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0

Nice presentation on WCF

A very good comparision of browser performance 

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

Though its pretty old but still useful

Last six months have been great for me when I was exposed to the great world of scalability of my product. I will try to summarize some of my findings regarding scalability and then may take some of those stuff in detail in coming days/weeks/months.

1. Before we start anything related to scalability for the website measure the performance of the pages with a single user on a idle bandwidth above 500 KB/s.
2. To measure the response time of pages do the following
   1. Install tool like HTTPWatch on your machine. The basic version is free and available on http://www.httpwatch.com.
   2. Set the expiry content on the virtual directory to large number of days i.e. 3 or 5 or 10 (this can changed based on your particular need).
   3. Set the Application Pool(IIS 6.0) property such shutdown worker process if idle for 20 minutes and restart after 1740 minutes. (Switch off this setting).
   4. Now traverse through the selected interactions that you would like to measure once. This will warm up the browser cache.
   5. Now measure the response time using the HTTPWatch.
   6. If the response time of the page are below 3 seconds then it is right case for scalability otherwise first tune the pages to bring the response time below 3 seconds.
3. One of the first thing that you should target to improve the scalability is to start with the database layer.
   1. Check how many queries are getting fired per interaction.
   2. Is there any redundant data being fetched.
   3. If yes then can we cache the data to lesser down database resource usage.
   4. Can we differentiate between Read and Write operations on database.
   5. If yes then can we have separate connection string for both of them.
   6. This is useful if you want to have separate database for Read and Write. (Synchronization can be an issue, will propose my proposal in later posts).
4. Moving to the website having aspx pages,
   1. Are you using Session variables?
   2. If yes then use ASP.NET State Service for storing the session variables.
   3. Do you store the data in files?
   4. If yes then can they be stored on shared location.
   5. Do you generate content dynamic?
   6. If yes then can they move to shared location.
   7. Now use the VS 2005 Load Test tool to identify the bottleneck for number of users at which the website starts breaking or deteriorating.
5. Use Windows 2003 Server Network Load Balancing (NLB) component to load balanced your website. Its simple to configure and leverage.
6. Now again use the VS 2005 to load test tool to measure now at what point the website starts deteriorating.

One of the reason of slow response time is the way we have written the ASPX pages. In my coming post I will share my experience.

For Last Sixty Years, we who belong to Middle Class have been exploited by the political class. They never bothered about us. We’re ourselves to blame as we never bothered to take time and cast our VOTE,our power to change the CORRUPT SYSTEM.

This time irrespective of Sun,Rain, Winter or any other thing lets make sure we PUNEKARS take time on 23rd April 2009 and cast our VOTE. Lets show the political class that we the Middle class also count and they should start taking notice of us. The Middle class is not bothered about region, religion or caste or anything that divide an Indian from Indian. The Middle Class believe they are first INDIAN.

Lets all INDIANS pledge and say that

I WILL VOTE ON 23rd APRIL 2009

One of the finest innovation in recent time. Please check this video and wish the day this innovation will be in common man hand.

Last 3 months I have been closely associated with the world of virtualization. If I stop and give a thought to this entire concept of virtualization, the only thing that come into my mind is that its one of the great revolutionary idea that the world of IT has seen over a decade.

From my perspective the following are revolutionary ideas in the field of IT

1. Virtualization
2. Internet
3. Google
4. Microsoft

Virtualization top my list for the simple fact it has almost bring a complete change in the way a system administrator views the system.

Let me first take some explains what virtualization means from a layman perspective

1. Half a century back, One computer was monolithic block spread across multiple room.
2. Then came the revolution in the electronics world with capacitors, transistors and brought the desktop.
3. Then I say there was stagnancy in this entire field where the goal was improving the efficiency of single desktop called it as a desktop or server class box.
4. Then the birth of new word virtual, which created machine within machine. Thats the virtual machine and that mark the begining of virtualization.
5. The birth of this new idea was from the fact that a box whether desktop/server never utilizes its resources 100%. Most of the time the resources are un-utilized.
6. What virtualization does it divides a single physical box into multiple virtual machines. Each having its on operating system and its own application.
7. All these virtual machine can co-exist together and can work in tandem without interfering each other.
8. Each has its own IP address, its own users, its own installed application, its own registry etc-etc.
9. Currently the following are the vendors who provide the virtualization products
   1. VMWare
   2. Citrix
   3. Microsoft
10. Microsoft is the late entrant in this area but they are already moving fast and their aim is to make virtualization ubiquitous with the launch of their Windows Server 2010.

Unfortunately I got the following page displayed in a bad manner on the google chrome.

Upper Part

Lower Part of the page

How do you access this page.

1. Traverse to MSDN Subscription home page http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/subscriptions/aa718656(en-us).aspx.
2. Click on Buy or Renew
3. Select a product and Continue (I selected VS 2008)
4. The following page is displayed https://om2.one.microsoft.com/opa/Product.aspx?StoreID=0a64ab52-0aa0-414a-904b-69eb320c3602&LocaleCode=en-us
5. Click on Full + International
6. Provide your credential till you reach the error page.

I hope it may be some small issue and will get fixed sooner or later.

Though I have started using Chrome only for some time, I have found couple of things.

Two process 

Whenever the Chrome is launched it creates 2 process (chrome.exe)

It could be intentional it seems but why??

Page Properties missing

I have been using IE since ages so used to certain feature like when you right click you find Page Properties option. I didn’t find this option in Chrome….