Programmatic Load Testing?-- outside Visual Studio

I was just wondering if there is a FREE framework I can use to programmatically run WCF load tests o开发者_JS百科utside of Visual Studio. I've seen that NUnit provides such functionality for unit testing, but can you do load testing with it?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

2 Java based solutions are The Grinder and JMeter. If you doing strictly HTTP based testing one of these could work for you. JMeter is an app, not a framework, but it can be driven by XML. The Grinder is an api that requires Jython, so you would need to know or learn Python.

I have tried both of these and found them to be industrial strength solutions with steep learning curves. In the end, I convinced my company to buy Visual Studio Ultimate because that is what I know.