Just sharing some of my inconsequential lunch conversations with you... RSS  

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

BizTalk Server 2010

Here are the main new features:

  • Support for the latest platforms from Microsoft including server, database and development environment.

  • Enhanced developer productivity and new application life cycle management experience for development teams.

  • New capabilities for implementing agile SOA integration solutions across heterogeneous technologies and Line of Business systems.

  • Enhanced B2B and RFID capabilities to allow the implementation of flexible end-to-end supply chain management and asset tracking solutions.

Yes, the EPCIS Query and Capture interface event handlers are finally there! And it comes with a free developer edition.

PS: at the time of this post, it wasn’t on the MSDN subscription.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Another testing success story

I’ve been re-architecting our typical .NET web application on a new project we are starting. There are some huge changes: we are adopting MVC over WebForms, Entity Framework over NetTiers, and we are finally adopting a new workflow engine.

To mitigate the risks of starting a project with all these new variables we’ve started stressing the application as soon as we could. And soon meant running load tests over a very crude application.

Web stressing an application on such an early stage poses a challenge on the team itself, as most of the time at least a couple of scenarios fail to execute properly, but this is the phase where the feedback we are getting from the load tests can deeply influence the refactoring of the architecture itself.

We’ve started the load tests with some simple CRUD and workflow scenarios. All it took was 10 virtual users and less than a minute and we’ve exhausted some critical resources on the server (database connection and workflow engine handles). Some of the Entity Framework data layer calls started failing, most of the workflow engine calls failed, and we could no longer login on the workflow engine. We were also eating up memory usage. None of these errors were identified by the development team on the development process.

After a quick code review we’ve identified a bunch of places we’ve missed to call Dispose. We could now run the same load tests with no errors, so we’ve programmed a load test to find out how many virtual users can we project so that the application server’s CPU stays below 80%. The test failed with the following error:

“Limit of 250 virtual users exceeded”

Yes, this is my kind of error! We’ve re-programmed the load test to stay within the licensing limits and left it running for the night: less of 30% to CPU usage on the application server, no error and no leaks. Cool!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

At last Apple is (being forced) to move on the right direction

Apple stated that they are “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code”.

It’s about time, developers and owners should have full control over the devices and apps.

Also about time Steve Jobs (indirectly) admits iPhone market share is being challenged. To say the least :)

Development Catharsis :: Copyright 2006 Mário Romano