Month: November 2008

Comparing two XML strings is painful.  So of course, my current project required me to come up with a way to do it in .NET.  I could only use version 2.0 of the framework, and I didn’t want to add more dependencies to solution that already has plenty (which ruled out XML Diff and Patch).  So far, I’ve come up with the following bit of code:

The validationXml contains a string representation of the XML being validated against.  It also means I only have to create one instance of XmlDocument.  After creating an XPathNavigator on the XmlDocument being compared,  an XPathExpression for the subset of XmlDocument being validated, and an XPathIterator, it can be called.

The “params” keyword makes the last argument optional, so it can contain zero or more names of XML elements to ignore when deciding whether or not to call an Assert.  I’m still figuring out how to optimize this, but I think it’s a good start.

I spent most of this morning looking for a replacement to Application.ExecutablePath.  The reason for this was because certain unit tests that depended on this code failed when a used any test runner other than the NUnit GUI.  When using test runners like ReSharper and TestDriven.NET, Application.ExecutablePath returned the executable of the test runner, instead of the DLL being tested.

Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase returned a file URI with the DLL I wanted, but subsequent code which used the value threw an exception because it didn’t accept file URIs.  This made it necessary to convert the file URI into a regular path.  I haven’t found a .NET Framework method that does this yet, but the following code seems to do the trick:


private static string ConvertUriToPath(string fileName)
{
fileName = fileName.Replace("file:///", "");
fileName = fileName.Replace("/", "\");
return fileName;
}