Imagos Consulting Weblog

Site Performance Testing (Part 1)

imagos — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:28:01 +0000

There are a number of approaches to getting performance metrics for a web site. Ultimately web site performance should be best gauged by the page response within a client browser.

Using a collection of available tools such as Firefox, Firebug and Harlog you can get a realistic baseline of your expected site performance. This approach leverages Firefox and Firebug to collect data on site performance. Using Firebox to fetch pages from the site gives results that would be similar to those seen by visitors. Firebug is used to collect detailed metrics on page performance. NetExport is a plug-in for Firebug that lets to send Firebug results to a data receiving service. Harlog is used as a data reciever to collect metrics and to generate a tab delimited file that can be used to generate reports in Excel or another reporting tool.

Install Firefox, Firebug, NetExport and Harlog on a test PC.

Setup Harlog by downloading the latest files from http://www.imagossoftware.com/harlog/ and copying them into a suitable directory. For this example I will use c:\harlog. Create a directory under c:\harlog also called logs. Edit the HarLog.exe.config file and create a series of XML format settings between the tags. These settings are:

Now you can run the HarLog.exe with a -w switch to run as a mini-web server.

Now launch Firefox, and go to about:config (this will allow you to change the beacon URL for NetExport to send data to HarLog). Find the preference setting for extensions.firebug.netexport.beaconServerURL and if you have installed HarLog locally set the value to http://localhost:9090/ also set extensions.firebug.netexport.autoExportToServer to true. If are running HarLog on another PC or port set the address appropriately.

Next launch Firefox go to your test site, and open the Firebug window and go to the Net panel. Under the “Export” activate “Auto Export”. This will send the results from the Firebug Net “waterfall” to HarLog each time a page from the site is loaded.

When you have completed your testing, import the “results.txt” file into Excel or another reporting application to format and or chart your site results. More in part 2

Twitterest – Silverlight Twitter Status

imagos — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:49:46 +0000

I have been using Twitter more lately to keep up to date with colleagues, family and friends. Twitter has a nice simple interface, and a good programming API. With all of this, I have written Twitterest to blend Silverlight, the Twitter REST API and some server side C# to cache the Twitter API responses.

Twitterest shows statistics for people in my “Following” group, including the number of posts that each has made, the number of people in their friends list and the the number of people following them. People are sorted by a selected criteria and the ranking is displayed in a spiral. The larger the count the further along the spiral and the larger the persons button is. Clicking on a criteria button loads the latest stats for that criteria.

The latest Twitterest can be found at http://www.imagos.fl.net.au/silverlight/twitterest/

Technorati tags: Silverlight Twitter Twitterest

Building Silverlight Controls

imagos — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:30:48 +0000

To build applications using Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 you will most likely need some user interface controls. While the first release of Silverlight does not include any controls, other than a video playback control, the rich development framework will support building custom controls. The following custom controls can be used as the basis of a number of applications:

Button
Slider
Check box
Radio button
Edit box

Authoring Silverlight applications can be done using your favourite tool; Visual Studio, Blender, Notepad etc. Code fragments presented can be paste into an existing project. Each custom control example includes a XAML and Javascript template fragment that can be customised for your application.

Button

A button control is the simplest custom control to create in Silverlight. Any Silverlight object (UIElement), of collection of objects, can become a button by intercepting the “MouseLeftButtonDown” or “MouseLeftButtonUp” events.

The following example uses a rectangle and text block places on a canvas to create a simple button image:

XAML

JavaScript


    function buttonMouseLeftButtonDown(sender, keyEventArgs)
    {
	   alert("Hello world!");
    }

This button doesn’t provide any visual state indication. By adding handlers for the “MouseEnter” and “MouseLeave” events a basic mouse over can be built. By combining this with Silverlight animations a Windows Vista (aero glass) like button can be created.

XAML

JavaScript



function ClickMe(){
   alert("ClickMe");
}

function GlassButtonMouseEnter(sender, args){
   var sb = sender.findName(sender.Name + "_glow_enter");
   sb.begin();
}

function GlassButtonMouseLeave(sender, args){
   var sb = sender.findName(sender.Name + "_glow_leave");
   sb.begin();
}

In the next I will look at building a simple slider control.

Tags: Silverlight

3D Spinning Logo in Silverlight

imagos — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:41:18 +0000

Breeze Designer, which is a a 3D modeler I wote as a graphical modeler and front end to the popular POV-Ray ray tracer and also a long term hobby project of mine, is being extended to be able to handle a number of new technologies including Microsoft’s Silverlight. As part of this I have created a simple 3D spinning logo of the CGI Australia company. I have posted a sample animation at http://www.imagos.fl.net.au/silverlight/cgi/ The logo was originally created in Adobe Illustrator then imported into Breeze Designer where it was animated into a 3D the spinning version.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Breeze Designer POV-Ray

Hello world!

imagos — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 01:22:38 +0000

Hi to everyone from me, Neville Richards. This is my new blog on the world of Microsoft Technologies and 3D including Silverlight, Sharepoint and Breeze Designer from a developers perspective.

I will be presenting a few real world tutorials over the next weeks to show how Microsoft’s Silverlight can be used to improve the user experience of sites without a complete site redesign. Hopefully blending some development with a little design in the process.