Solid development

Inconclusive / ignored tests converted from NUnit to MSTest correctly

martin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:02:58 GMT

This article describes how to integrate NUnit tests into the TFS build. It also supplies a link to a XSLT file for the conversion between the NUnit results to an MSTest format.

The result is great; in the details of the Build Explorer you will see the number of Passed, Failed and Other Result tests. However, when you click the results you will see that any 'Other Result' tests (tests with for instance the IgnoreAttribute) will show up as 'Failed' tests. Also the Quality Indicators graph will show them as 'Failed' tests.

I've edited the XSLT file to solve this; around line 157 I've changed the 'xsl:choose' to:

 <xsl:attribute name="outcome">

   <xsl:choose >

      <xsl:when test="@success='True'">

         <xsl:value-of select="'Passed'"/>

      </xsl:when>

      <xsl:when test="@executed='False'">

         <xsl:value-of select="'Inconclusive'"/>

      </xsl:when>

      <xsl:otherwise>

         <xsl:value-of select="'Failed'"/>

      </xsl:otherwise>

   </xsl:choose>

</xsl:attribute>

Now not only the count works correctly, also the test details and quality indicators graph shows them as 'Inconclusive'.

Ps. I assume the possible values of 'outcome' are listed in Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Common.TestOutcome (located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Common.dll)

Beware of MSBuild warnings about missing projects in a solution

martin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:31:22 GMT

Beware of a warning that may occur during a Team Build that indicates that a dependent project is missing in a solution. Note that the warning will not appear in the ErrorsAndWarnings.txt because that only reports the errors and warnings from compilation itself and not those specific to MSBuild.

The warning found in BuildLog.txt is:
SomeSolution.sln : Solution file warning MSB4051: Project {A88..DB} is referencing a project with GUID {756..6AA}, but a project with this GUID was not found in the .SLN file.

Usually nothing problematic happens and the code compiles correctly. If you're unlucky and the dependent project has not been build yet it will cause the build to fail. But if you are very unlucky the build may succeed, but some files are missing in the drop location. This may happen if the problematic solution is build near the end of the Team Build. In this case the compiler detects that the dependent assemblies are no longer needed (it uses the "obj\Release\ProjectName.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt" to detect this) and deletes them.

Merging sub collections into one collection

martin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:14:00 GMT

Sometimes a LINQ query or other method returns a nested collection but you just want one big collection instead. SelectMany is the answer, see the code below. It can off course also be combined with OrderBy or Distinct if you prefer.

List<List<double>> nestedList = new List<List<double>>

                                   {

                                      new List<double> { 1.2, 2.4 },

                                      new List<double> { 3.6, 4.8 }

                                   };



List<double> flatList = nestedList.SelectMany(doubleList => doubleList).ToList();

foreach (double item in flatList)

{

   Console.WriteLine(item);

}

Diagnosing TFS builds

martin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:10:17 GMT

Build fails from some strange reason or build does not perform the things you expect it to do, what to do? Every team build in the TeamBuildTypes folder contains a TFSBuild.rsp file, perform a check out and add the following command argument to it:

/v:diag

Check the file in and run the build; beware that the log size increases dramatically. The build log contains very detailed information, even the contents of all variables used in the build.