Scott Barber just posted some info about: Patterns & Practices: Performance Testing Guidance, a new guide to Performance Testing over at Microsoft's Codeplex.

from Scott:

"I am involved in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance project. We have reached a critical mass with regards to our "mostly final" content and have made that content publicly available"

"We're tackling various flavors of performance testing (stress, load, capacity) as well as how to bake performance testing into your life cycle."

from the Patterns & Practices site:

"The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around doing performance testing and using Visual Studio 2005. It's a collaborative effort between industry experts, Microsoft ACE, patterns & practices, Premier, and VSTS team members."

I have always had ambivalent feelings towards MS, but it is great to see all of the effort they are putting into the Performance field. Performance has always been a sort of niche domain. It straddles the disciplines of development, testing, and operations, while also involving the integration of software, hardware, and networks. The past few years have provided much more thought leadership that is pushing the state of Performance (load, stress, scalability, capacity, availability) into more mature territory.

For those that don't know Scott Barber, he certainly gets my vote for the most prolific writer in Performance over the past several years. His body of writing is second to none: http://www.perftestplus.com/pubs.htm