Stand-Alone Network Emulator for VS2010 Beta 2

At the “Load Testing SharePoint 2010 with VSTT” presentation at SPC 2009 I’ve learned about the new network emulator, allowing one to model various network latencies and bandwidth values. The emulator is available as a part of Visual Studio 2010. I’ve got excited, and found the following two great blog posts by Lonny Kruger, first one describing how to enable the emulator through the VS2010, and the second one – how to write a stand-alone emulator, which would rely on VS2010 API but not require running a load test to simulate specific network characteristics. Also for reference, here is an MSDN page on the topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd505008(VS.100).aspx 

The only problem was – these 2 blog posts were for the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio 2010, while I already had the Beta 2, and some changes were made in the Beta 2, that are worth to note here. I have written a stand-alone emulator using Lonny’s post as a starting point, but changing a few things to get it working with the Beta 2. The tool can be downloaded here, and its source code - here. Below is a list of pre-requisites to get the emulation tool running, and description of what and why I have changed compared to Lonny’s original post. I recommend reading his two posts first to get a better context.

Pre-Requisites

You would need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 installed in order to run the emulator. I’ve tested the tool with VS2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition on a 64-bit Windows 7 box. You would also need .NET Framework 4.0, which is installed by default when you install the Visual Studio. Once you have that, you need to install network emulation driver. This is done one time only through the Visual Studio UI. From that point on, you don’t need to start Visual Studio to run the stand-alone emulator.

Enabling the Driver

The driver is accessed via a Test Settings dialog. You need to create test settings first. One way to do it is to create a new Test Project: File >> New Project… >> Test Project. Below is a screen shot of a project type selector dialog.

 

Once you have a test project, you can double-click on the Local.testsettings solution item in Solution Explorer to bring up the Test Settings dialog, then enable Network Emulation as shown on the following screen shot:

Lastly, to enable the driver click on Configure button for selected and checked Network Emulation. Follow the prompts asking to confirm the driver installation:

You can now use the network emulator as a part of Visual Studio for web performance and load tests, or close Visual Studio and use the stand-alone tool, for which you need administrator’s rights.

 

Stand-Alone Network Emulator Source Code

I started off by copying Lonny’s sample code, except that I use a WPF application as opposed to WinForms. Once I built and ran it, I kept getting negative long values returned through interop from the NativeNetworkEmulationAPI class, which is listed in Lonny’s post. Tried running the program as administrator – still same errors. So using reflector I inspected the Visual Studio network emulation classes, and found this type, which appears to serve the same purpose as the NativeNetworkEmulationAPI: Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.NetworkEmulation.NetworkEmulationDriver. All I needed to do was to change method calls to use this class instead of the NativeNetworkEmulationAPI.

Regarding the network profiles, you have to edit these XML files following Lonny’s instructions to make them work. If you simply use the OOTB profiles, you will not get an error, but the emulation won’t start. I have copied and changed the default network profiles, so you only need to do this if you want to add a new custom profile, in which case just place the profile XML file into Profiles sub-folder and re-start the emulator.