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Chapter 10, Work with Visual Studio Tools
#79 Stress Test Web Applications
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<FollowRedirects type="bool" value="True"/>
<RedirectDepth type="long" value="15"/>
</StaticTest>
</DefaultValues>
ACT: The Standalone Tool
Up to this point, you’ve seen how to use ACT from within Visual Studio.
However, you cannot get to all of ACT’s functionality from within Visual
Studio itself. Other features available in the standalone tool are:
• Graphical reporting
• Report breakdown
• Additional statistics
• Defining users
• Performance counter monitoring
To see all that ACT has to offer, you must use the tool on its own. This sec-
tion will highlight ACT in that way.
Create an ACT Project. To use ACT for performance testing, you’ll first need
to create and deploy your web application in one of the configurations men-
tioned earlier. Once you’ve done that, you can create an ACT Project by fol-
lowing these steps:
1. Click Start
➝ All Programs ➝ Visual Studio .NET 2003 ➝ Visual Studio
.NET Enterprise Features and select Microsoft Application Center
Test.
2. Click File
➝ New Project (Ctrl-N).
3. In the New Project dialog box, type a name for the project and select a
location (by default, the location is in the C:\Documents and Settings\
<username>\My Documents\ACT Projects directory). Then click OK.
4. You can save the project any time by clicking File
➝ Save Project (Ctrl-S).
Creating new tests. You can create and