Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

7.5. Useful Tools for Manual Testing

During the process of manually testing the application there are a number of tools which you can use to be more effective. An effective way to help manually test an application is application logging.

During execution, applications can log information to various sources. This information can be obtained to help you understand what is happening under the covers and ensure that the system is working as expected. There are a number of times when applications can appear to be working perfectly, however they are actually throwing different exceptions. Many people feel this isn't a problem because the user is not affected; however, there is a performance hit when every exception is thrown, while being bad practice to let exceptions be thrown without valid reasons.

One of the approaches to logging in ASP.NET is Web Events. Web Events capture a wide range of information about the website but fundamentally there are four main events which are of interest:

• Heartbeat. This is a regular event which captures the current state of the site with runtime information. This is useful when monitoring the site to verify how it is working during a long period of time.

• Audit. This event is based around security events, such as login failures.

• Errors. Unhandled errors which occur within your application are logged.

• Base Events. These base events allow you to write and develop custom events for your own application which can be logged with the main ASP.NET applications. ...