If you are anything like me, you probably have the latest version of Internet Explorer and/or Firefox on your machine.
If you are anything like me, you have clients that don’t. They are often still supporting Internet Explorer 5, or some archaic version of Netscape.

Though it is a little dated, I found a rather helpful post on semicolon, today. The post on multiple Internet Explorer versions in Windows discusses stand-alone versions of Internet Explorer available through an Internet Explorer browser archive from evolt.com. The post goes one step further, identifying a defect in IE where every version uses common registry settings causing it to always identify itself as v6, even if you are using a different version. The post contains a workaround; drag this Version bookmarklet to your links toolbar, and when you click it, it will show your actual version.

I would also like to take his post one step further. The full browser archive, which semicolon does not mention. Not only does evolt include Internet Explorer, but seemingly every browser ever available, such as Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Lynx.

Scott Hanselman has a good post today about the HttpOnly cookie attribute. It secures the cookie from access via the DOM. “The value of this property is questionable since any sniffer or Fiddler could easily remove it. That said, it could slow down the average script kiddie for 15 seconds.”

Read Scott’s full blog entry.

Here’s the meat-and-potatoes of what Scott came up with; it’s for your global.asax:

protected void Application_EndRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    foreach(string cookie in Response.Cookies)
    {
        const string HTTPONLY = ";HttpOnly";
        string path = Response.Cookies[cookie].Path;
        if (path.EndsWith(HTTPONLY) == false)
        {
            //force HttpOnly to be added to the cookie
            Response.Cookies[cookie].Path += HTTPONLY;
        }
    }
}

Years ago, way back when the web first started to become universally popular–and I’m talking about popular with all demographics and not just geeks like me–there was the 30KB rule, and it was a cardinal sin to break it. The entire request, including your HTML, your images, and everything else your page contained, had to come in under 30 kilobytes. Most homes were surfing through the web on a 28.8kbps modem, which pulled 30KB in about 10 seconds. Beyond that 10 seconds, and your users were too bored, frustrated, or confused to wait another moment, and were off to pursue the next site in your WebRing. 30KB. That was the limit. It was universally accepted. And, save a few ransom notes on GeoCities, everyone followed it.

Whatever happened to the 30KB rule?

Today constantly see pages that are 100KB or more, and those are even compressed responses. Everyone is so caught up in broadband, and developing on their 100mbps LAN, that they forget about the little guy. What about grandma? My poor grandma still surfs the internet with a good ol’ 57.6kbps modem. And even if she could pull off that speed (US restrictions limit to 53, max) it would still take 20 seconds to yank that monster through the pipe. My poor grandma shouldn’t have to wait that long.

Often times if I wade through the muck that makes up the offending request, I see 60KB style sheets, references to JS files that contain functions not even used in this page, big honkin’ j-pegs, useless JavaScript comment blocks that easily pile on a few K, and my nemesis: ViewState. (I hate ViewState. ViewState hates me. It’s a good relationship.)

My company is making an application, and the primary audience is a bunch o’ satellite offices stuck in the 20th century. They plug in to a whopping dual ISDN which maxes out at a whopping 128kbps. That’s 16KB/sec for you young folk. That 100KB page will take 7 seconds to pull across the wire. Toss that fact in to the 10-second rule, and you only have 3 seconds to process the request. I have visions of little ones and zeros flying towards the light screaming “We’re not gonna make it!!”

Get a haircut. Trim those bushes. Bring that response size down a few K. Here’s a few ways to tame the beast:

Reduce ViewState
“Remember that ViewState is evil.”
It adds a big, encrypted string to a hidden form variable in your HTML. However, this beast gets bigger with every web control that you have. Explicitly turn off viewstate on every control that does not use it, or better yet, turn of viewstate for the entire page. Of course, realize that the not-dot-net crowd is laughing at you while you do it.

Eliminate Comments in Release Code
“Keep your comments to yourself.”
It is great to comment your code. It is fabulous. Every developer should bow to you if you comment your code, because not enough do it themselves. However, unless it is compiled code or in code-behind that isn’t sent to the client, it has to go. You can keep your comments in the version stored in SVN, VSS, or whatever your favorite source control tool is, but your release code should contain no client-side comments. Your client doesn’t read them, their browser doesn’t care about them, and all it does is slow everything down, so give them the axe. Your network administrator will love you for it, too.

Optimize Images
“Phenomenal, Artistic Imagery, Itty-Bitty Living Space.”
Compress your images. Get them as small as your image editor can get them (small: file size, not small: pixel size) without degrading the image beyond acceptable levels. And if you use a GIF, lower the number of colors (which will lower the number of bytes). When your images get smaller, people get happy.

Eliminate Whitespace
“One Program: One Line of Code.”
This is a cheap trick to squeeze out those last few bytes. If you have a news article that’s 9 pages long, open it up in notepad and turn off word-wrap, it becomes one big long line that stretches out forever and is impossible to read. But, your browser could care less. Take out all of the horizontal white space that you use to make your code readable, and then take out all the line breaks to make your HTML one big line, and your browser couldn’t tell the difference. However, you just chopped a few more bits.

Enable Compression
“GZip it, and GZip it good.”
If all else fails, and you’ve gotten your pages as whittled down as you can, and they are still big, compress it. Then again, even if they are small, compress it. It will add a few more CPU cycles on both ends to compress and decompress the response, but the time lost is greatly countered by the time saved in data transfer. Typical compression is around 40%, which takes that 100KB file down to 60KB, and saves my grandma nearly 8 seconds. She’ll give you a kiss and squeeze your cheeks for that one.

In case you haven’t heard of it yet, Watir is the greatest thing to hit automated functional testing since…well…ever. Watir (pronounced “water”), or Web Application Testing In Ruby, is an open source automated functional testing tool powered by Ruby. My company has been living off QuickTest Pro, and it is not much of a leap to Watir. Much like QTP, it automates an instance of Internet Explorer and navigates its way around your web site, however unlike QTP, it doesn’t hijack your computer when you do it; with Watir, the IE window doesn’t have to be the foreground window, so you can get something else done while your test is executing. Watir also allows various checks much like QTP, but though programming includes the capability of checking much more, such as object hierarchy or object style. (Yes, Watir can make sure that your validation messages are red!)

Your money manager will love Watir, too. Our switch from QTP will save us thousands of dollars per year from Mercury’s annual support costs. For a moment, I think our company president’s pupils turned to dollar signs like a cartoon.

If you are like me, and spend your QTP days in ‘Expert’ view (Source code), you will pick Watir up quickly. I even find it better than QTP. Additionally, since it is just a source code file, edited in Notepad if you like, it can be stored in your favorite source control application AND (this is a big ‘and’) your developers can execute the automated tests themselves without proprietary software like QTP. Its easy integration with NUnit will also tie your automated functional tests in with applications like Nant and CruiseControl.

More Information
Read all about Watir.
Read Bret Pettichord’s (a Watir creator) blog entry about Watir.

I like to think that my development team is full of competent and capable people, and not one of them was aware of this: Internet Explorer has a limitation on the number of cookies per domain (MSDN Reference).

From: “Number and size limits of a cookie in Internet Explorer”
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306070

Microsoft Internet Explorer complies with the following RFC 2109 recommended minimum limitations:

• at least 300 cookies
• at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the size of the characters that comprise the cookie non-terminal in the syntax description of the Set-Cookie header)
• at least 20 cookies per unique host or domain name

We recently started having random authentication problems with our eLearning platform. It turns out that our application, plus everyones favorite Single-Sign On, plus SCORM, plus courseware created by third-party vendors created enough cookies to blow the top off the cookie jar. IE can only handle 20 cookies. Create a 21st cookie, and the oldest cookie is given the axe, which is generally an authentication cookie, a session ID, or some other very important cookie (as the ‘elders’ usually are).

So, be aware of your cookie jar. Monitor the number of existing client-side cookies in use when testing that new application. Harass other developers if they start using too many. Keep yours hands out of the cookie jar!

Oh, and don’t forget to encrypt them (but that’s a different post topic).

Fictional scenario: Trek–Lance Armstrong’s bicycle sponsor–is behind schedule and over-budget on creating a new cycle. They need to find a way to get their product out the door, find it now, and find it cheap. Now, imagine that they threw my grandmother on their bike, had her drive it around the block, and declared it fully tested and ready for mass-production. Would you be satisfied? If it found 300 grandmothers and had them drive around the block twice, would that satisfy you? How about if they used 300 average Joes? Would that satisfy Lance Armstrong? Would he have full confidence in his ride for twenty-one days and over 3,500 km in the tour? I doubt it. That bike wouldn’t even make it out of the warehouse, let alone to the starting line. That bike would not earn respect until it was rigorously tested in a scenario that at least simulates its intended use. So why do so many fail to put their web applications through the same trials?

Money? It will cost more money to fix it after launch than it will to test it during development, identify the issues early, and get them fixed before the product goes out the door.

Time? Well, time is money, so see above.

Experience? There are a lot of good, quality testers out there. If my mechanic doesn’t properly fix my car, I’ll take my car to a different mechanic.

I’m curious about the thoughts of everyone out there.

We’ve all been there. You’re cruising down I-5, minding your own business, when the big SUV next to you decides that it is time to change lanes, and that it wants to occupy the space you are currently claiming for yourself. Or there’s the motor home doing 61 in the left lane passing the tractor-trailer in the right lane that’s doing 60. There’s the guy that passes everyone at the construction zone, repeatedly ignoring “Lane Ends. Merge Left,” and expects that someone will let him in when pylons encroach, and he will force the issue if they don’t.

All of this traffic congestion, incompetence, and utter disregard for fellow citizens pollutes your driving experience. You work day is stressful enough. Why must you go through it on the way home?

Your web applications have to go through the same thing: A poorly-coded neighbor with the memory leak, that just keeps taking and taking from the available RAM, until there is nothing left for your app, just like that SUV; An application that didn’t get properly optimized, and hogs all of your available bandwidth, slowing down your application like that 40-foot RV; An evil report that thinks it is superior, and locks the entire database from outside access until it is finished generating that 400-page PDF.

When you are testing the performance of your application, make sure that the environment you are about to stuff it in to is up to par. No matter how pristine your application looks in Staging, it is only going to be as good as the environment that you launch it to. If you ignore the big picture, and your application succumbs to the web environment pollution, your application will be to blame. No matter how mediocre the environment is without your application, your superiors or clients will still say “the environment works just fine without your app.”

Build a testing environment that mimics production, and that includes any other applications or components that you will be sharing resources with. Create some generic scripts that will generate traffic against these neighbors and execute tests against your application. This will help identify any integration issues between you and your environment, and help eliminate any surprises when you launch.

The environment is supposed to work just fine with your app, too.

In the QA forums I frequent, there are often questions about how to properly load test when you don’t have access to production or an identically built environment. Most companies won’t spring the cash to build an environment that is identical to production; generally, testing environments are made up of hand-me-down servers that used to be in production. Of course, there is also the cost of test suite licensing to produce a productional load, and the near impossibility of mimicking real production traffic.

Though a production clone would be ideal, a watered down environment can be sufficient, and in some ways better. Bottlenecks are achieved faster, without having to push through 50 Mbps of data. Additionally, a “lesser” environment will be more sensitive to changes; your transaction may take 0.5 seconds on production-grade servers, and a defect that doubles it to 1.0 seconds is hardly noticeable, but on a lesser environment where that transaction takes 6.0 seconds, doubling it to twelve throws up red flags.

For a watered-down environment, try to lessen the horsepower of your system while matching the architecture. If your productional environment is eight web servers that are all quad 3.2 Ghz Xeons running Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, and all load balanced through a hardware load balancer, you can bring it down to two web servers with less horsepower–perhaps dual 700Mhz P3s–but the servers should still run Windows Server 2003 Web Edition and be balanced with a hardware balancer. Do not drop below two web servers because you will still want a load balanced environment, and do not switch to Windows 2000 or use Microsoft’s NLB (Network Load Balancing). If your production web environment uses Windows 2000 and NLB, obviously use that technology in your testing environment; do not switch to Windows 2003 or a hardware load balancer.

Additionally, try to reduce equally throughout your environment. Don’t drop your web servers from Pentium 4s to Pentium 3s while dropping your database servers from Pentium 4s to an old 486 desktop. Equal reductions maintain your continuity, and in the end, your sanity. Unequal reductions introduce new problems that don’t exist in production, but will still happily waste your time and money. A major bottleneck might exist on your web servers, but the defect could be masked because you were database-bound by using that old 486.

The idea behind this is that many bugs can be introduced by a specific revision of your OS (Think of the problems from Windows XP SP2), from your style of network infrastructure, the version of your graphics driver, etc. You want as many common points as possible between your testing and production environments to eliminate any surprises when you launch your application. Ideally, your testing environment is an exact replica of your production environment, but unless you are making desktop applications, it is only a fantasy, so just try to get as close as you can. Use the same OS version, including the same service pack and the same installed hot fixes. Use the same driver versions, and configure the same settings on your web server software. You are trying to create a miniature version of your production environment, like a model car or a ship in a bottle. Pay attention to the details and you will be okay. To your application, the environments should be exactly the same; one is just a little snug.