Performance testing is hard!

At Tridion we run a fair amount of performance tests on every release.
But it is still very hard to create a dataset that covers most customer scenarios, so you will actually test the right stuff.

In 5.1 SP2 we missed one of those scenarios, causing the performance to suffer from it, without us knowing it. Of course our customers do notice it, so we have to troubleshoot afterwards.
Customer Support made my day today when I received the feedback on a hotfix I created last december:

"This hotfix improved response times unbelievably!"

Lovely. Although there is off course some pride in this, it is amazing that the customer is so pleased to see the performance back to normal. :-)

COM Types in interop projects

The Tridion Object Model (TOM) is still in good old (VB6) COM.
When creating eventsystems, or other solutions on top of the TOM in .Net, it can get hard to know what you are dealing with.

Typically (in C#) you would use something like:

TDS.TDSE tdse = new TDS.TDSEClass();

object o = tdse.GetObject(myUri,TDSDefines.EnumOpenMode.OpenModeView,

                            null, TDSDefines.XMLReadFilter.XMLReadAll);

Now, what Tridion Type is object o???

First guess: use o.GetType!
Sure (says the CLR), its a __ComObject (duh).
Well, that didn't help us any thing.

Second Try.
What does Bill tell us to to?
Lets create a function like this:

public string TridionType (object o)

{

    if (o is TDS.Publication)

    {

        return "Publication";

    }

    else if (o is TDS.Folder)

    {

        return "Folder";

    }

    // and so on, and on, and on... and maintenance hell and so on

}

Since we do almost all of our .Net development in C#, the easiest solution was a bit hard to swallow:

Add a reference to the "Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Runtime" assembly.
The above mentioned function is then simply reduced to:

public string TridionType (object o)

{

    return Microsoft.VisualBasic.Information.TypeName(o);

}   

Damn... I just found an advantage of VB.Net

Gotta love (or hate) Dell

14 Months ago I bought this nice little very silent PC from Dell to use as my Home-server.
At only 350 euro one of the cheapest you can buy. Last week the harddisk died. Figures.
2 Months after the end of warranty. And the stupid disk is only used for storing my backups, so not much harm done. Still, the extended warranty would have cost more than a replacement disk now. It does show however that Dell is getting its prices down by adding cheaper (less quality?) hardware....

Guess I will be re-arranging my hardware these days again...

BluePrint structure

I had a question about the complexity of our BluePrint structure in our Multiuser tests recently.

It's about time!

Yeah, I know, by this time EVERYBODY has a blog.
So, better late than never. No predefined content or categories yet, I'll go with the flow and do some braindumps or mindsharing. Probably related to Tridion, .Net or the good old COM world.