Gath Adams

Usually, if you are writing in c# or vb.net then when you want to automate a browser you would use the MS WebBrowser control (AxWebBrowser). However, that control is missing some attributes (eg - you can’t set the referrer), but Firefox gives you the lot.

All the hard work is done by the SWAT (Simple Web Automation Toolkit) library (http://ulti-swat.wiki.sourceforge.net/). Download the SWAT.dll and add a reference. You also have to add the file Interop.SHDocVw.dll to the same directory and also add a reference.

A quick demo - get the first result from Google for a search term:

                Dim sResult As String
                sResult = GoogleFirstResult("web hosting")

        Private Function GoogleFirstResult(ByVal sSearchTerm As String) As String
                Dim oFireFoxBrowser As SWAT.WebBrowser

                oFireFoxBrowser = New SWAT.WebBrowser(BrowserType.FireFox)
                oFireFoxBrowser.OpenBrowser()

                oFireFoxBrowser.NavigateBrowser("http://google.com")

                oFireFoxBrowser.SetElementAttribute(IdentifierType.Name, "q", "value", sSearchTerm)

                oFireFoxBrowser.StimulateElement(IdentifierType.Name, "btnI", "onclick")

                'Give the browser a chance to get to the site.
                oFireFoxBrowser.Sleep(1000)

                GoogleFirstResult = oFireFoxBrowser.CurrentLocation

        End Function

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You’ve just updated your site. The changes look great - both in IE and Firefox - so you release it. And all is good.

Until a few days later, when the emails start to pile up. It doesn’t work in IE6. Problem is, you don’t have IE6 installed anymore, and don’t have access to a machine that does. Enter Browsershots.

Browsershots will give you a screen shot of your website (or specific page) in over 60 browsers. It does this by farming out the work to various ‘factories’ (people that are running the browsers on their machines. Just submit your URL & choose the browsers you want, wait a few minutes in the queue, then view the results.

Here are some results for WeGotDomain.com (the thumbnails are small, but you get bigger pics at browsershots).

This is so useful, it just blows me away. Oh, and it’s free. Anyone know of any other sites like this?

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Tuning SQL Server can be a real pain - everyone knows the basics; return the minimum rows, use indexes etc - but sometimes you need to get some hard stats.

Before we begin, I am going to assume you are running in Query Analyzer, or some tool that allows you to change the connection parameters.

Execute:


SET STATISTICS IO ON
SET STATISTICS TIME   ON

This gives you useful info on how many pages were read in your query (both from the cache and from disk)   and how long it takes.

Eg, after running a query, here are the stats:

Table 'DG_UserProperties'. Scan count 0, logical reads 2154, physical reads 10, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.
Table ‘DG_Users’. Scan count 1, logical reads 1083, physical reads 27, read-ahead reads 1, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.


SQL Server Execution Times:
CPU time = 16 ms,   elapsed time = 213 ms.


It is important to reduce the ‘reads’ and the CPU time. Elapsed time can vary depending on server load, so isn’t as important when comparing queries.

After each set of statistics, clear the cache otherwise the next query will use it & give an incorrect comparison.


DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS
DBCC FREEPROCCACHE


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