Brothers In Code

...a serious misallocation of .net resources

Goodbye Nunit-agent.exe

Once I started using Visual Studio 2010, I could no longer attach to nunit to debug my tests.  Instead I found that I had to attach to nunit-agent.exe instead.  Up till now this was a non-issue.  However, some performance profilling methods require a start-up app, and nunit starting it's own process was confusing it so I was forced to find the reason for this new process.

It turns out it's because nunit by default is set to run under the 2.0 framework and it needs to run a separate process in order to test 4.0 assemblies.  The good news is that you can force nunit to run under 4.0 with this change to your nunit.exe.config:

<startup>
<requiredRuntime version=”v4.0.30319″ />
</startup>
 
You can verify the before and after effect by looking at Tools -> Test Assemblies in nunit.

Generating A WCAT Script With Fiddler

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.