If you’re building a web application, how many users can you support before your application falls over, catches on fire and sinks into the swamp? The truth is, unless you’ve done some form of load testing, you really can’t be sure. The problem is that while load testing seems like is should be easy, it really isn’t. In spite of what many tool vendors will tell you, there is a lot more to it than recording a test and playing it back with 1000 users. In this session I will present a case study of a recent engagement I undertook to load test a client’s application. I discuss how we used the Visual Studio load testing tools (the good, the bad and the downright ugly), the challenges the application architecture presented and how we mitigated them as well the general strategy we used to test the application. I’ll show you what worked, what didn’t, what we did wrong, what we did right and what we would do differently next time.