Month: June 2009

MSBuild Transforms, Batching, Well-Known Metadata and MSTest

Posted on by Scott

Thanks to a comment from Daniel Richardson on my previous MSTest post (and a lot more research, testing, & debugging), I’ve found a more flexible way of calling MSTest from MSBuild.  The main drawback of the solution I blogged about earlier was that new test assemblies added to the solution would not be run in MSBuild unless the Exec call to MSTest.exe was updated to include them.  But thanks to a combination of MSBuild transforms and batching, this is no longer necessary.

First, I needed to create a list of test assemblies.   The solution is structured in a way that makes this relatively simple.  All of our test assemblies live in a “Tests” folder, so there’s a root to start from.  The assemblies all have the suffix “.Test.dll” too.  The following CreateItem task does the rest:

<CreateItem Include=”$(TestDir)**bin$(Configuration)*.Test.dll” AdditionalMetadata=”TestContainerPrefix=/testcontainer:”>
<Output TaskParameter=”Include” ItemName=”TestAssemblies” />
</CreateItem>

The task above creates a TestAssemblies element, which contains a semicolon-delimited list of paths to every test assembly for the application.  Since the MSTest command line needs a space between each test assembly passed to it, the TestAssemblies element can’t be used as-is.  Each assembly also requires a “/testcontainer:” prefix.  Both of these issues are addressed by the combined use of transforms, batching, and well-known metadata as shown below:

<Exec Command=””$(VS90COMNTOOLS)..IDEmstest.exe” @(TestAssemblies->’%(TestContainerPrefix)%(FullPath)’,’ ‘) /runconfig:localtestrun.testrunconfig” />

Note the use of %(TestContainerPrefix) above.  I defined that metadata element in the CreateItem task.  Because it’s part of each item in TestAssemblies, I can refer to it in the transform.  The %(FullPath) is well-known item metadata.  For each assembly in TestAssemblies, it returns the full path to the file.  As for the semi-colon delimiter that appears by default, the last parameter of the transform (the single-quoted space) replaces it.

The end result is a MSTest call that works no matter how many test assemblies are added, with no further editing of the build script.

Here’s a list of the links that I looked at that helped me find this solution:

Detect .NET Framework Version Programmatically

Posted on by Scott

If you need to determine what versions of the .NET Framework are available on a machine programmatically, you’d ideally use a C++ program (since it has no dependencies on .NET).  But if you can guarantee that .NET 2.0 will be available, there’s another option.  The source code (written by Scott Dorman) is ported from a C++ program.  I’m using the library for an application launcher that verifies the right version of the .NET Framework is available (among other prerequisites).

Calling MSTest from MSBuild or The Price of Not Buying TFS

Posted on by Scott

When one of my colleagues left for a new opportunity, I inherited the continuous build setup he built for our project.  This has meant spending the past few weeks scrambling to get up to speed on CruiseControl.NET, MSTest and Subversion (among other things).  Because we don’t use TFS, creating a build server required us to install Visual Studio 2008 in order to run unit tests as part of the build, along with a number of other third-party tasks to make MSBuild work more like NAnt.  So the first time a build failed because of tests that had passed locally, I wasn’t looking forward to figuring out precisely which of these pieces triggered the problem.

After reimplementing unit tests a couple of different ways and still getting the same results (tests passing locally and failing on the build server), we eventually discovered that the problem was a bug in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.  Once we installed the hotfix, our unit tests passed on the build server without us having to change them.  This hasn’t been the last issue we’ve had with our “TFS-lite” build server.

Build timeouts have proven to be the latest hassle.  Instead of the tests passing locally and failing on the build server, they actually passed in both places.  But for whatever reason, the test task didn’t really complete and build timed out.  Increasing the build timeout didn’t address the issue either.  Yesterday, thanks to the Microsoft Build Sidekick editor, we narrowed the problem down to the MSTest task in our build file.  The task is the creation of Nati Dobkin, and it made writing the test build target easier (at least until we couldn’t get it to work consistently).  So far, I haven’t found (or written) an alternative task, but I did find a blog post that pointed the way to our current solution.

The solution:

<!– MSTest won’t work if the tests weren’t built in the Debug configuration –>
<Target Name=”Test:MSTest” Condition=” ‘$(Configuration)’ == ‘Debug'”>
<MakeDir Directories=”$(TestResultsDir)” />
<MSBuild.ExtensionPack.FileSystem.Folder TaskAction=”RemoveContent” Path=”$(TestResultsDir)” />

<Exec Command=””$(VS90COMNTOOLS)..IDEmstest.exe” /testcontainer:$(TestDir)<test assembly directory>bin$(Configuration)<test assembly>.dll /testcontainer:$(TestDir)<test assembly directory>bin$(Configuration)<test assembly>.dll /testcontainer:$(TestDir)<test assembly directory>bin$(Configuration)<test assembly>.dll /runconfig:localtestrun.testrunconfig” />

</Target>

TestDir and TestResultsDir are defined in a property group at the beginning of the MSBuild file.  VS90COMNTOOLS is an environment variable created during the install of Visual Studio 2008.  Configuration comes from the solution file.  Actual test assembly directories and names have been replaced  with <test assembly> and <test assembly directory>.  The only drawback to the solution so far is that we’ll have to update our MSBuild file if we add a new test assembly.

CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild and Multicore CPUs

Posted on by Scott

When I was trying to debug a continuous build timeout at work recently, I came across this Scott Hanselman post about parallel builds and builds with multicore CPUs using MSBuild.  While adding /m to the buildArgs tag in my ccnet.config didn’t solve my timeout problem (putting the same unit tests into a different class did), pooling multiple MSBuild processes will certainly help as our builds get bigger.