VS2008 licenses, eyeballing JMeter and hitting the ground running.

It turns out that the license for VS2008 TE is only a single use license which means that only one of us can use it at a time. I haven't had a chance to test this in actuality to see if it contacts a MS licensing server or something like that. I did get it installed but haven't had a chance to make any coded web tests.

I did take a look at JMeter for my current assignment and I don't think that it is going to be exactly what I need. The FTP sampler might work as it will upload/download any given file name and it is my assumption that the filename can be referenced with a variable of some sort but I haven't played with JMeter enough to determine if that is true. The E-Mail sampler appeared to be a e-mail reader only with POP3/IMAP whereas I need to send e-mails with SMTP.

The current thought is that in the short term I will code some agents with perl to do the tasks that I need (FTP/SMTP) and see if I can generate the load that I need against the server.

I'm also in the process of installing the application on a Virtual PC 2007 VM of Win2k3 Standard and going through the various machinations of getting the application setup. Today I took care of the FTP server and the e-mail server. Tomorrow will be SQL Server 2005. Hopefully by the end of the week I'll know the various sub-components and then be able to do some rudimentary perl coding and get an idea if I am going down the right path.

I still want to go back and give JMeter a once over just to see if I have missed something with respect to SMTP and the E-Mail sampler. The learning curve on JMeter is pretty steep but I still believe that some good stuff is there to be had. I haven't had a chance to look at The Grinder 3 at all but am still very interested in a Jython solution. But, if my employer is willing to spend the fundage on VS2008 TE licenses I may not concentrate on The Grinder 3 much and give more attention to JMeter and VS2008 for my load testing needs but I don't want to take any tool off the table completely.