Title: Best way to load test without webtest in Visual Studio
Tags: c#;visual-studio-2010;performance-testing
Question: I've been running load tests to test the overall performance of the system we're building, but I've run in to an issue and I'm not sure of the best way to solve it. What I want to do is have some other commands that get run that are not a web request, but I would like to still use all the loadtest functionality (counter monitoring, concurrent users, etc....). I haven't found a way to do this without having to make an actual webtest. I can obviously cheat the webtest and have it return a dummy web request. But I was curious if there was a better way of doing this. It seems like something that would be at least somewhat common but I was unable to find any information.
Comment: Please, specify "some other commands that get run".


Here is another answer: If these additional non web commands can be triggered via an API you could create a Unit Test that triggers the API.

Here is another answer: Take a look at the WebTestPlugin Class
If these other commands are preparations for the actual test, just implement event handlers for one of the Pre... events, like PreWebTest or PreRequest.
If these command are meant to create an additional load on the system, like batch processing, I don't know if these is a dedicated type of test for this, but you could make a dummy webtest making some irrelevant request, and start the actual commands in the PreRequest event handler. Then, mix this Webtest into you load test.

{'source': 'StackExchangeDataset', 'subset': 'stackoverflow.com', 'metadata': {'AnswerCount': 2, 'CommentCount': 1, 'ContentLicense': 'CC BY-SA 3.0', 'CreationDate': '2012:00:11/07/12', 'FavoriteCount': None, 'PostTypeId': 1, 'Tags': '<c#><visual-studio-2010><performance-testing>', 'Title': 'Best way to load test without webtest in Visual Studio', 'ViewCount': 465, 'id': 13276513, 'user_AboutMe': '', 'user_AccountId': 328052.0, 'user_DisplayName': 'Zipper', 'user_Reputation': 6884.0, 'user_Views': 195.0, 'user_id': 650784.0}}