Quick Overview of Coordinated Universal Time by Scott Mitchell

This article, 'Using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to Store  Date/Time Values', by Scott Mitchell, provides the reader with a good working knowledge of why using UTC time is important.  As we begin spanning the globe, in a conquest of world domination, its been necessary for developers, business analysts, and yes, managers, to understand the significance of 'when' something happened, relative to a specific time zone and just as importantly, that we are prepared to deal with it. 

Scott's article provides a nice reference to pass around to get people jump started before delving into more technical gooeyness.

Testing Guidance

With the release of Performance Testing Guide for Web Applications I realized that there were a couple of testing related resources that I tend to refer to pretty consistently.   By listing them here I'm creating a 'favorites', of a sort, so that I can quickly get back to them. 

 

Reference Material

• MSDN BizTalk Product Documentation: Performance and Capacity Planning
• Managing a Successful BizTalk Performance Lab - an excellent resource, whether your doing BizTalk testing or not.
• BizTalk Performance Lab Delivery Guide - a great start on outlining some things to consider when being tasked to execute a benchmark, or testing engagement. 
• Performance Testing Guide for Web Applications - a release from the Patterns and Practices group focused on testing. 
• Windows Server System Reference Architecture -  The WSSRA is one of those handy references whether you planning on building an development/testing/production environment, or managing one; its all there!
• BizTalk Server Database Optimization - An excellent article that builds upon the foundation of other BizTalk performance guides.
• Improving ASP.NET Performance and Scalability - The title says it all.  It also covers .NET performance in general.
• Performance Testing Guidance - patterns & practices performance testing community site on CodePlex.

 

Tools

• LoadGen - Free load generation tool that's fairly easy to use.
• BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer