The Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is simple tool for stressing a web server. It's fairly straight forward, but because it's UI is very minimal, it can be a little tedious to set up a test. Microsofts older Web Application Stress Tool (WAS) had a nice feature to record a browser session by acting as a proxy and so I did a quick google search to see if I could find something similar for WCAT. As further testimate to Fiddler's awesomeness, "thomad" has written a great WCAT Fiddler plugin that does exactly what I want.
It's always driven me nuts that the default paste method in most programs includes the formatting of the original source. Later MS Office programs finally have some options to paste "using the destination format", but that didn't help me when pasting into things like this BlogEngine.net editor. The quick fix was to paste first into notepad, but I finally had enough and googled a better solution. Sure enough, a guy named Steve Miller created a nice little tray app called pure text. You copy as you always would but substitute windows-v for ctrl-v. Exactly what I was looking for!
I needed a way to force an application to stay on top. I thought it would be as simple as "this.Activate" in the form's deactivate event. It looked like it was trying to work - when clicking out of the app, it's start bar button would blink, but it wouldn't bring the app back on top. I then proceeded to try just about everything under the sun:
- Form.Activate
- Form.BringToFront
- Form.Focus
- Form.Show
- [DllImport("User32.dll")]
public static extern Int32 SetForegroundWindow(int hWnd);
Everything seemed to do the same thing. Finally I thought that maybe I was trying to refocus the form too soon. I decided to create a timer and delay the Activate call:
//declare the timer
private System.Timers.Timer restoreFocusTimer = new System.Timers.Timer();
//setup the timer in the constructor
restoreFocusTimer.AutoReset = false;
restoreFocusTimer.SynchronizingObject = this;
restoreFocusTimer.Interval = 1000;
restoreFocusTimer.Elapsed += new System.Timers.ElapsedEventHandler(restoreFocusTimer_Elapsed);
//define the handler
void restoreFocusTimer_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
this.Activate();
}
//enable the timer in the deactivate event (I also added a preprocessor directive so i could disable it when debugging.
private void MainForm_Deactivate(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!this.formClosing)
{
#if !NOALWAYSONTOP
restoreFocusTimer.Enabled = true;
#endif
}
}