Author: Scott

Random SQL Tricks (Part 1)

Posted on by Scott

One of my most recent tasks at work has been generating test data for integration tests of a new application.  We don’t have the version of Visual Studio which does it for you, and rather than write an app that did it, I spent the past week hunting for examples that just used Transact-SQL.  The initial post that I found the most useful is this one, in which the author provides five different ways of generating random numbers.  I use his third method quite often, as you’ll see in this post (and any others I write on this topic).

One of our needs for random test data was alphanumeric strings of varying lengths.  Because the content of the text mattered less than the need for text, it didn’t have to resemble actual names (or anything recognizable).  The first example I found of a T-SQL stored procedure for generating a random string was in this blog post by XSQL Software.  The script does generate random strings, but they include non-alphanumeric characters.  To get the sort of random strings I wanted, I took the random number generation method from the first post and the stored procedure mentioned earlier and adapted them to this:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[SpGenerateRandomString]
@sLength tinyint = 10,
@randomString varchar(50) OUTPUT
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON
DECLARE @counter tinyint
DECLARE @nextChar char(1)
SET @counter = 1
SET @randomString = ”

WHILE @counter <= @sLength
BEGIN
SELECT @nextChar = CHAR(48 + CONVERT(INT, (122-48+1)*RAND()))

IF ASCII(@nextChar) not in (58,59,60,61,62,63,64,91,92,93,94,95,96)
BEGIN
SELECT @randomString = @randomString + @nextChar
SET @counter = @counter + 1
END
END
END

The range in the select for @nextChar is the set of ASCII table values that map to digits, upper-case letters, and lower-case letters (among other things).  The “if” branch values in the set are those ASCII table values that map to punctuation, brackets, and other non-alphanumeric characters.  Only alphanumeric characters are added to @randomString as a result.  Having a stored procedure like this one available makes it much easier to generate test data, especially since it can be called from other stored procedures.

Introducing Doxygen

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Last Wednesday evening, I gave a presentation on Doxygen at RockNUG.  I didn’t actually bother with slides in order to give as much time as possible to actually demonstrating how the tool worked, so this blog post will fill in some of those gaps.

Doxygen is just one of a number of tools that generate documentation from the comments in source code.  In addition to C# “triple-slash” comments, Doxygen can generate documentation from Java, Python, and PHP source.  In addition to HTML, Doxygen can provide documentation in XML, LaTeX, and RTF formats.

Getting up to speed quickly is pretty easy with Doxywizard.  It will walk you through configuring all the necessary values in wizard or expert mode.  When you save the configuration file it generates, the purpose and effect of each setting is thoroughly documented.  One thing I will note that may not be readily apparent is that you can run Doxygen against multiple directories with source code to get a single set of documentation.  It just requires that the value of your input (INPUT) property contain all of those directories (instead of a single one).

Converting MSTest Assemblies to NUnit

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If you wanted to convert existing test assemblies for a Visual Studio solution from using MSTest to NUnit, how would you do it?  This post will provide one answer to that question.

I started by changing the type of the test assembly.  To do this, I opened the .proj file with a text editor, then used this link to find the MSTest GUID in the file and remove it (the guid will be inside a ProjectTypeGuids XML tag).  This should ensure that Visual Studio and/or any third-party test runners can identify it correctly.  Once I saved that change, the remaining steps were:

  • replace references to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework with nunit.framework
  • change unit test attributes from MSTest to NUnit (you may find a side-by-side comparison helpful)
  • delete any code specific to MSTest (this includes TestContext, DeploymentItem, AssemblyInitialize, AssemblyCleanup, etc)

After the above steps, NUnit ran the tests without any further modifications.  All of my calls to Assert worked the same way in NUnit that they did in MSTest.

MSBuild Transforms, Batching, Well-Known Metadata and MSTest

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Implementing Mouse Hover in WPF

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We’ve spent the past couple of weeks at work giving ourselves a crash course in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and LINQ.  I’m working on a code example that will switch the datatemplate in a list item when the mouse hovers over it.  Unfortunately, WPF has no MouseHover event like Windows Forms does.  The usual googling didn’t cough up a ready-made answer.  Some hacking on one example did reveal a half-answer (not ideal, but at least a start).

First, I set the ToolTip property of the element I used to organize my data (in this case, a StackPanel).  Next, I added a ToolTipOpening event for the StackPanel.  Here’s the code for StackPanel_ToolTipOpening:

private void StackPanel_ToolTipOpening(object sender, ToolTipEventArgs e)
{
e.Handled = true;
ContentPresenter presenter = (ContentPresenter)(((Border)((StackPanel)e.Source).Parent).TemplatedParent);
presenter.ContentTemplate = this.FindResource("Template2") as DataTemplate;
}

The result: instead of a tooltip displaying when you hover over a listbox row, the standard datatemplate is replaced with an expanded one that displays more information.  This approach definitely has flaws.  Beyond being a hack, there’s no way to set how long you can hover before the templates switch.

Switching from an expanded datatemplate back to a standard one involved a bit less work.  I added a MouseLeave event to the expanded template.  Here’s the code for the event:

private void StackPanel_MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
ContentPresenter presenter = (ContentPresenter)(((Border)((StackPanel)e.Source).Parent).TemplatedParent);
presenter.ContentTemplate = this.FindResource("ScriptLine") as DataTemplate;
}

So once the mouse moves out of the listbox item with the expanded template, it switches back to the standard template.  Not an ideal solution, but it works.

This link started me down the path to finding a solution (for reference).