A natural extension to the cloud-based load service, this simplified browser-based authoring and configuration experience enables practically anyone to create and run a load test.

Performance testing is often relegated to specialist performance engineers and treated as one of the niche areas of testing, where the tester needs to a proficient in the performance testing space. 

This new simplified browser-based authoring experience reduces this down to three simple options: the URL you want to test, how many users and how long do you want the load test to run for.

If you are Visual Studio Ultimate user, to get started navigate to your Visual Studio Online account home page.   Once there you will see Load test hub or Load Test Tile on the Visual Studio Online account home page.

Clicking either takes you to the page where you can start load testing your app in just a couple of seconds.

Here you can also (optionally) specify other settings like how many users, duration, think time and browser distribution. The only option that doesn’t have a default is your application’s public URL.

In this example there where no errors while generating load on the app, but below you can see a case where the application was not performing correctly and all the responses which are not http return code 200 are listed.

Of course the Visual Studio IDE continues to support the full authoring experience, more advanced tests and  load test specific scenarios.   So if you want to create complex tests with more scenarios, you can always customize your load test using Visual Studio Ultimate by adding multiple URLs, generating load on your app in various patterns and increasing the user load , adding data sources, monitoring application performance along with the load run, generating trends etc.

Being fully integrated with the load testing in Visual Studio Ultimate, you can view the output report either in Visual Studio Online or the Visual Studio Ultimate as well as compare load test runs between the made from Visual Studio Online to those made in the Visual Studio Ultimate.   In the image below you can see a cloud-based load tests Brian Keller ran as well as some load test run by Brian Randell and myself that we initiated from Visual Studio Ultimate

Click on the “Download load test” and you can download a sample web and performance load test project which you can open in Visual Studio Ultimate (2013 and onwards).

Do provide us feedback on how has been your experience with load testing with Visual Studio Online.

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/category/30927-visual-studio-test-and-lab-management