Visual Studio

Testing T4 templates using mock framework (MoQ)

Jose Escrich — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:09:13 GMT

Some time ago I wrote a post in which I talk about how you can do unit tests over your text templates using the GAX Host. In that example I used a very simple template which receives just a couple of string properties. But it becomes more complicated when you have properties which are complex types ok I know, most probably you're thinking that can resolve that just creating your own mock objects and you're right.

But the thing is that you can do that in a really easiest way using a mock framework. I will not speak here about mock frameworks so you can find a lot of posts about it. I'll speak about MoQ which is a new mock framework developed by Clarius and other companies. You can know more about MoQ in the Daniel's blog and in its Google code page.

In the following example what I did was create a simple text template which uses an IEntitySchema object to create something like a Business Entity, so here we got an issue because we need an instance of that IEntitySchema and, the way to get it using the classic TDD approach, is creating an explicit Mock object.

So here is when MoQ comes to the rescue, if you see the code snippet it has a call to new Mock<IEntitySchema>() which will creates a proxy of an IEntitySchema implementation. After that, I defined our expectations for each interface signature in where we want to test an interaction.

So, at that point we're ready to perform the tests and make all the assertions, plus the really interesting thing, which is the verification of all our expectations. That basically means that, beside make the assertions over states, now we can check if some interactions was made or not (in other words if some method or some property in the interface has been called or not and if was called with certain parameters values and types or not).

I think that the test interactions are a really interesting thing to include in our classic Todd fixtures.

Download Sample Code

Enjoy.

GAX/GAT February 2008 Release

Jose Escrich — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:06:45 GMT

Finally, and after a grand effort, we got a final release of GAX/GAT February 2008 Release.

Mainly the most important improvements are that now you can use GAX side by side with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 and now you don't have to do the painful task to unregister all your guidance packages prior to uninstall the previous version of GAX. In this particular release, we made an Upgrade than an Installer so you won't have to uninstall GAX, it will be just a click on the msi to get it everything update without loss any guidance package previously registered (*).

Some of the improvements for this release are:

Support side by side for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.
Upgrade than Installer, the current GAX installer is an upgrade, so you don't have to uninstall all your guidance packages then uninstall GAX before to try install it.
Now you can also uninstall GAX whenever you want without unregister any guidance packages, it will do that for you ;), anyway you also have a nice UI in the uninstaller which tell you what guidance packages you will lost if you continue the GAX uninstallation.
Some error bug fixes when you use GAX for Visual Studio 2008 and the Experimental hive.

You can check the Grigori's Blog to get more information about this release.

Downloads

GAX and GAT must be downloaded and installed separately. GAT requires that GAX is installed first.

Remember: If you have a previous version of GAX installed on Visual Studio 2005, it will be updated to the February 2008 release of GAX. You are no longer required to uninstall GAX and the corresponding guidance packages (with an exception of GAT, which must be re-installed).

Enjoy!.

New T4 Template Visual Studio Editor.

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:31:18 GMT

During this past month I've been working in a new T4 template editor as a part of the SFT.

If you're working with dsl or gax you already know, how the editor looks when you try to edit a text template file, it looks like this:

So now you can have a fully colorized text editor for your T4 templates like the ASP.NET Vs editor and you can get it now downlaoding the ClariuS Software Factories Toolkit here.

Colorizing, Intellisense and Validation

In this release it's providing colorizing and intellisense for the T4 statements, like directives, class features and blocks. Regarding the directives you have intellisense for all well known directives and its properties and values.

One interesting feature is for those the well known properties which represents a type, the intellisense gives a complete list of the current project types including its references.

Validation

Like the ASP.NET editor you have a real time document validation.

Preview Transformation

One useful feature is the possibility to run a template transformation in design time, basically as you know, there are two common contexts to run t4 templates, that's a DSLTools Host and GAX Host. When you use the GAX host, most probably you use properties, so you can specify those properties values through the editor property window.

If you want to use complex types you can specify in the property declaration an UITypeEditor and a TypeConverter if it's needed.

So to run the transformation you just have to specify some values for the properties and run the preview transformation commands, which is located at top of solution explorer or in the editor context menu. After running the transformation you get a temp file with the output. If you've specified the ouput extension directive the temp file will have that extension, that's useful so that so to instantiate the proper Vs editor for that output file.

The transformation could fail for different reasons, if the transformation fails when the template is compiled you'll get those errors into visual studio error list, however if the transformation fails after the compilation and when the template is running you'll get the errors in a temp output file.

Debugging

Unfortunately, in this version the editor does not have debug yet, however in the meantime you can check the Garethj's Blog, there he has a post of how you can debug a template. I hope we could include this feature on future versions.

What's coming

We're working in one important feature which is supporting intellisense and colorizing for the embedded language like you already have in the ASP.NET editor.

You can try it now, download the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit from here.

Enjoy.

Recipe Designer and SFT June CTP

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:29:48 GMT

Today we shipped the June CTP of the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit, which includes a new version of the Recipe Designer. The main change what I've been working on, is the serialization behavior in order to support round tripping, beside that was an interesting opportunity to work implementing a custom serialization in a Dsl.

So now if you change the .xml extension of the recipe definition file with .recipe extension, you'll get a graphical representation of your recipe, the only constraint that it has is that it is not supporting XInclude.

Key features

Round tripping: Now you can edit your recipe using the default xml editor as usual maintaining the synchronization with the designer with no extra work.

Improved User Experience: Simplest new ToolBox. Now you basically have two connectors, one to connect arguments with wizard fields or action properties and another to define the flow between actions and between pages. Also the shapes includes useful information like the friendly type name and in the case of arguments if it's required or not

Main manifest syncronization: if the recipe definition is well formed, you'll get an xinclude of your recipe in the main manifest file. Also if the recipe already has a unbounded reference, it will be added in the BindingRecipe recipe.

Configurable Attributes Support: You can define in the designer view all your configurable attributes in any element that support it, like actions, valueproviders, etc.

We're working on the next release of Software Factories Toolkit, your comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome. You can give your feedback through SFT Forums.
http://softwarefactoriestoolkit.net/forums.aspx

Download Software Factories Toolkit Here.

Guidance Automation Extensions Febreary CTP is finally Out!

Jose Escrich — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:46:00 GMT

Some weeks delayed but is finally out!, this new Febrary 2007 CTP basically has support for Vista and includes another minor bug fixes. The most relevant bug fixes are the follow:

Support for Windows Vista
Guidance Navigator performance and display improvements
Handling of read-only .gpstate files
Use of standard system colors in wizards and dialogs
Fixes to registration recipes

Tom has published a detailed description of this new release here.

Download the new GAX Feb 2007 CTP here.

Removing Code Snippets from VS 2005

Jose Escrich — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:05:00 GMT

Quite a while ago I ran into the issue where I couldn't remove code snippets from VS. It seems that is not enough (using the hard way) with removing the registry key (that's it: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Languages\CodeExpansions\CSharp\[PathToYourSnippet]) and the proper snippet file.

To do that you should also remove the snippet from the ExpansionsXML.xml file. If you're using XP you will find this file here:

c:\documents and settings\[YOUR USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\1033

Although if you're running on vista, you will find it here:

C:\Users\[YOUR USER]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\1033

Unafortunately I sent this bug to product feedback but they close the bug.

Another thread where the issue is discussed:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos...