Three Tips to Successfully Load Test Microsoft Silverlight Applications

When it comes to creating or delivering high-end or rich internet applications and media experience on web, nothing is as powerful or trustworthy as Microsoft Silverlight. In terms of functionality it is quite similar to Adobe Flash, graphics, integrating multimedia, animations, or interactivity on a solitary runtime environment or platform.

Initially, Silverlight was designed to provide high end media experiences, so as to offer the designers and the developers the option of adding high extent of interactivity, media as well as animations to their web pages. However, the later versions subsequently included a wide range of capabilities with a number of value-added features that become absolutely essential for development of business apps. This has led to the increase in business apps with the use of Silverlight.

Majority of the companies at present opt for state-of-the-art technologies, when it comes to deploying critical apps of their business endeavour on web. Hence, the execution of each and every application needs to be evaluated under different environments as well as loads. A number of developers use MS Silverlight for developing robust applications and complementing the needs or objectives of their companies.

Now let us get into three crucial tips that help in successful test loading of Silverlight applications.

Tip#1: You need to be confident in supporting protocols or Silverlight communication

Silverlight apps are capable of using multiple protocols for communicating with the server. Based on Windows Communication Foundation or WCF, the most popular and widely used protocols are SOAP and REST that come up with either XML or binary XML.

For accurately simulating the users, load testing tools need to be strong enough to support different protocols that are used by Silverlight. This is to ensure that it becomes possible to set parameters of the pertinent requests.

REST Protocols

It defines a series of architectural principles which help in designing the web-based services, that follow the designing rules. These rules connote the application of a number of HTTPS verbs that include POST, PUT, GET, as well as DELETE. But for this ability, the tools will not be able to offer realistic designs for the virtual users. This will render the test results virtually meaningless.

SOAP Protocol

It is a simple protocol based on XML, that helps applications to exchange information over HTTP. There are actually two approaches that the testers can opt for, in order to handle the apps using this particular protocol. The first one is using an XML based manipulation while the second one is using a tool for load testing with a capability of dedicated SOAP support.

Tip#2: Automatic Processing of Application Identifiers

Silverlight applications help in internal processing with the use of identifiers. Some of these identifiers are application specific while the rest are common to all these applications. Whatever may the case be, all of these identifiers are utilized as various request parameters and they respond accordingly and work collectively.

These identifiers keep on changing for each fresh communication between the server and the client. Playing a particular recorded session back will result in errors because of incorrect identifier values.

Tip #3: Keep an eye on the server side

In case you are not that satisfied with the response time or if the application returns erroneous results, it is a thumb rule to go for a root cause analysis. One way to do that is monitoring the servers at the time of load testing.

As increasing number of companies are opting for mission critical internet apps, it becomes increasingly important to test the performance of these applications under various loads before they are put on live.

Silverlight delivers a wide range of expanded capabilities for developing a variety of new as well as powerful apps, which help in supporting various organizational requirements. The technology of one application may differ from that of another. Hence, every time load testing is done, an altogether new approach is the need of the hour.

In order to understand how a particular application or a range of applications will work in Silverlight production environment and what is the way of optimizing them to ensure higher performance or meet the business objectives in a seamless as well as effortless way, it is imperative that you follow these three tips discussed. You can hire testers from load testing companies who can help you in testing and analyzing your application performance.

We provide load testing services. If you want to hire performance testers or would you like to discuss with our certified load testers for your software testing needs, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.