What's in a benchmark? Typically, it's whatever the testing party darn well pleases. Benchmarks can be made to look like any other statistical data—you can manipulate things to say what you want them to.
Not so in the case of Microsoft's .Net StockTrader application, which the software giant used to test the performance of a .Net-based application against a Java-based application from IBM.
Microsoft used its .Net StockTrader application to show that .Net and WFC (Windows Communication Foundation), along with Windows Server 2003, could compete with and even surpass Java-based transaction processing applications, while also demonstrating interoperability with different platforms, said Greg Leake, Microsoft's technical marketing manager for .Net.
