When dealing with large web applications you will definitely have to apply some load to the infrastructure before going or even during being online. A Load test is a predefined set of URL requests that are submitted to your application from multiple virtual users. The number of the users or the amount of time a Load tests runs, can be defined from you.

By testing your application with Load tests you can be sure about the maximum workload or number of requests that your infrastructure can support and handle simultaneously. Having this information you can decide if you have to buy (on premise case) or rent (cloud case) new hardware.

With this article I would like to give some tips and tricks for features of the Load tests in Microsoft Visual Studio.

Choosing the right cache software for your web application is not an easy job. The first and most important question that you have to ask yourself is if you actually need a cache in your application. But what exactly is a cache and how an application can profit or not from its use?

A cache is a software component that is used for storing data in memory (RAM) in order to provide faster accesses to this data. Using a cache you can save time and I/O operations, since you do not access the data stored in other slower types of storages such as relational databases or XML files in a hard disk drive.

Most of the cache implementations provide a simple key-value storage, where the key is unique in the cache. The value can be then extracted by using the unique key. The type of the value can be from a simple primitive value (boolean, string, number) to a complex object. In both type-cases you have to serialize the key-value pair and most of the times store it a simple string in the cache (continue reading for more information about serialization and desirialization).

When working in an application which is divided into multiple architectural layers, it is often the case that the developers of a team do not trust the data their function get in one layer from a function in the same or in an another layer. For that reason they often add null checks (very common in C#) or in JavaScript’s case they add if (variable) {...} checks (implicit cohersion of values in an if clause) in order to catch an error before it happens and avoid breaking the execution of the code.

But is it that bad for a function to fail or is it that bad for your application to throw an exception when something did not go as it is supposed to go?