Chris Burrows' Live Space

One of the benefit that you get when working for a company like Readify is you are given time to spend brushing up on the latest technology.   With all of the new Visual Studio 2010 video's that Brian Keller has producing over the last week has been great to be able to spend a couple of days getting into them.     I must say that I have been impressed with some of the new features.   One that has caught my eye so far is the Dashboard that they are planning for the portal.  Whilst watching the Requirements Management and Traceability screen cast I grab the following pictures to give you an insight into what the new portal is going to look like.

After playing around with Windows Live for a while I have decided to make Windows Live the centre of my digital world. To that end I have finally moved my blog across.   Redirects are in place and the new address is http://madtechnology.spaces.live.com.

The team has been doing some great work around Team Build and have made some significant changes to the way that it works.    While watching the Channel 9 Video from Jim Lamb I grabbed some screen shots of the improvements.   There are many more so I would recommend that you watch the video.

Here they are:

New Build Summary Screen

Activity Log View of Build Summary

Broken Builds View on Build Summary Screen

This one is really interesting,  What you can do is double click on the error and if it is a compile error it will bring up the version of the file that was build and allow you to fix the error and check it back in again.

One of the challanges that I have been having lately was getting code coverage working on our build machine.  I was able to get code coverage working for normal dll's but I couldn't get it working for Web Application projects.    The old saying "it worked on my machine" held true in this case.    I could get the code coverage working for the Web application project, but I couldn't get it working on my machine.   After scratching my head for a while, I thought to myself where is the code for the web site getting executed when you just tests against the web site.    After having a look on the build machine, I had a hunch that it might be in the _PublishedWebSites directory.   So I added a quick bit of code to the web application project to write out it's location to the event log and it confirmed my hunch.   (For those of you who are unsure where the _PublishedWebSite directory is found it is in <BuildDirectory>\<TeamProjectName>\<BuildTypeName>\Binaries\<Configuration>\_PublishedWebSites.  On my build machine that is d:\build\TestTeamProject\TestContinuous\Release\_PublishWebSites.    

So how did I solve the problem.   What I did was open up the solution file on the build machine underneath the  <BuildDirectory>\<TeamProjectName>\<BuildTypeName>\Source directory.   I then openned up the .testrunconfig file (See Enabling Code Coverage) and added the assemblies that I wanted to enable code coverage for and I suddenly had code coverage results.

For those who don't have access to the build machine, you can achieve the same thing by editing the .testrunconfig file manually.    Instead of double clicking on the .testrunconfig file, right mouse click and selected open with.  This will bring up the following dialogue. 

Select the XML Editor.  This will bring up an XML editor from which you can manual edit the file.   The section that you are looking for is below:

	

		
<isCodeCoverageEnabled type="System.Boolean">True</isCodeCoverageEnabled>
	
	

		
    <codeCoverageItems type="System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Common.CodeCoverageItem, Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a]]">
	
	

		
      <_items type="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Common.CodeCoverageItem[]">
	
	

		
        <element type="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Common.CodeCoverageItem">
	
	

		
          <binaryFile type="System.String">bin\Debug\UpdateWarehouse.exe</binaryFile>
	
	

		
          <keyFile type="System.String" />
	
	

		
          <pdbFile type="System.String">obj\Debug\UpdateWarehouse.pdb</pdbFile>
	
	

		
          <instrumentInPlace type="System.Boolean">True</instrumentInPlace>
	
	

		
          <outputDirectory type="System.String" />
	
	

		
        </element>
	
	

		
      </_items>
	
	

		
      <_size type="System.Int32">1</_size>
	
	

		
      <_version type="System.Int32">1</_version>
	
	

		
    </codeCoverageItems>
	

All that you need to do is add in one of the elements and update the _size and _version with the number of elements in the collection array.      A tip that I discovered.  Normally when you open the .testrunconfig file as an XML document all you see if one long string.   If you do CTRL+A then CTRL+F (That is select all then Edit.FormatDocument).