Sun, surf's up, first a Loadfest and now a Loadgen

Sunny Seattle is not a myth.  I should always plant grass seed on July 21st because to date it has rained exactly once since!  Not so great on my grass but my vitamin D count is at an all-time high.

I'm in a surf's up mood, of course there isn't much swimmable surf anywhere close to Redmond but it did drive some inspiration for a t-shirt you might see if you are attending PDC.  Speaking of PDC it is going to be a lot of fun - more on that later.  Unfortunately because of everything going on in preparation for PDC including a tour I'm doing this week across the USA I had to made a hard decision and I pulled out of TechEd NZ and Australia.  While that was super dissapointing for me personally (its the first TechEd NZ/USA I'll miss as an attendee or presenter since '99) - you will still get the BizTalk Server 2006 content delivered as I've been helping some of the excellent local folks with my content.

In case you haven't seen it I did a Tech Talk with Paul Ballard from theserverside.net which is now on line.  Paul is a cool guy and his camera-man had an even more interesting background.  His camera-man's day job was literally shooting combat footage around the world  (which he has won numerous awards for) so setting up a stage for me was child's play in comparison.

Enough commentary - here is why you need to read this entry.  We finally released the BizTalk Server 2004 Loadgen tool.  Lots of folks want to put load on their BizTalk Servers and I couldn't count the number of people who continue to write single-threaded load generation applications and wonder why we don't perform (its because you aren't putting enough simultaneous load into us by serializing the input at the client end).  Enough of that, let's give you a copy of the loadgen tool that we use internally for testing so you can use the same thing. The loadgen tool can exercise a variety of adapters, has an extensible framework for you to add your own, xml configuration and is generally pretty cool.  As I said we use it for all kind of internal performance testing and now you can get access to it right here.

While I've reached an all time low on blog posting in the last month or so, I'll try and make it up in September starting September 14th.