James World has worked on some of the most heavily trafficked web applications in the world, and he had the task of breaking and improving them in the bargain. James shares with us his wealth of experience earned testing, profiling, and improving customer's applications in Microsoft's Application Development and Consulting Team in the UK.
The best part of this story is that I met James when he attended a Pluralsight virtual class as a student. He was able to share many of his experiences with the other students, and I was determined to get him as a guest on the Pluralcast! Plus, he's English, so he sounds really smart from the first spoken word.
James World recently left Microsoft UK after nearly 10 years as an Application Development Consultant. During that time, he ran the Performance and Scalability Labs for the ADC team, helping Microsoft's customers with a variety of performance related challenges. He joined Citigroup in July as a .NET Technical Specialist in the global Development Engineering team where he spends much of his time helping teams get the most from Visual Studio and TFS 2010.
To keep it real, he co-founded the online testing company, The Test Factory, in 2007 which runs entirely on a Microsoft solution he designed and developer with some colleagues in his spare time. A developer at heart, he started writing code on his father's ZX Spectrum at the age of six and since then has stopped only for the occasional bite to eat. James would like to assure everyone that in no way do his eccentric ramblings reflect the opinions of his employers past or present.
If broken it is, fix it you should. Tess Ferrandez's excellent profiling/debugging blog.
Log Parser 2.2 – A must have for analyzing log files of all kinds.
The Test Factory – A completely different kind of performance testing!
WCF Load Test – Generate load tests for WCF applications from their trace logs.
MSDN article on Virtual Round Trip Analyzer.