Entries by Shog9

I was cleaning up around the house last Sunday evening... A drain had clogged, and in the process of getting it unclogged, things had become messy. Since I was cleaning anyway, I took the time to straighten up a few other areas, including some potted plants and cabling. When finished, I had a left-over mint plant, and forty-some feet of damaged Ethernet cable. Since I had plenty of other things to do, and didn't particularly want to do them, I spent a relaxing half-hour knotting a plant hanger with the cable.

Twenty years ago, this would have been called "recycling". But in these enlightened times, I feel fully justified in calling it a "green" plant hanger. Even though it's blue.

Just upgraded to CC.NET 1.3. And it didn't work. It spectacularly didn't work. Ok, it just didn't work:

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: The format of the file 'ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.WebDashboard' is invalid.

Unfortunate, that. After a few fruitless web searches, I re-installed 1.2, and of course, that worked. Which gave me an idea...

Loaded 1.3 again, checked InetInfo settings, and sure 'nuff - it was still set to the 1.1 framework (1.3 is the first .NET 2.0 version of CC.NET). Change it to 2.0, and all was right with the world.

After almost three days, i finally narrowed down an intermittent problem with a certain library. Turns out, it's contained within a rules engine we borrowed from another group.

A rules engine that isn't thread-safe.

It's 2007. We're using .NET. There's precious little need to make random variables static (er, rather, "Shared" - this is VB.NET). And it's trivially easy to add a bit of locking to avoid the problem, if you really must share the current rule with every other instance.

Worse yet, this isn't even the problem i was trying to track down.

So now, i'm tired, depressed, and no where near done. I know in my head that this isn't the fault of VB, but my heart still lays blame.

I've just uploaded the GreaseMonkey "boot" script for CPhog 1.9.1

This will probably be the last release before I bite the bullet and go in for some major restructuring. I've been using it for months now, and it's reasonable solid... but there are just too many remnants of the quick-and-dirty little script i threw together a couple of years ago.

Notable changes with this release include the ability to load threads longer than 50 posts, "QuickBio" pop-up user profiles, and "ForumWatch" panels.

Under the hood, changes include lots more reliance on jQuery for DOM and plugin/content loading, some solid structure to new features (plugin-style loading rather than the "one huge script" style I'd labored under for so long), and the use of GlobalStorage instead of GM_setValue/GM_getValue (prefs.js). Many thanks to David Stone for his work on all of this, not to mention cleaning up a lot of my old code.

More details here...

NUnit now includes the Framework for Integrated Test (Fit) engine. I'm not entirely sure why (there seems to be some support for using it to run NUnit tests) but my curiosity upon seeing the new DLL led me to read more about Fit. And it couldn't have been more timely - the project I was working on had something like 47 test cases taken directly from sales orders, complete with supplier-provided "known good" outputs - a perfect *ahem* fit for Fit testing.

And what a beautiful thing it is. A few minutes work, and the Excel spreadsheet of test cases was a HTML document suitable for feeding into the .NET version of Fit - much preferable to the manual translation of each scenario into a NUnit test, or (*shudder*) manually entering each case into my interactive testing app. I'd been planning on creating a bulk-testing interface anyway, and this just seemed too good to be true - it was almost exactly what I'd been planning, and saved me the time and effort of writing and debugging a custom CSV parser + test harness.

The only thing lacking was integration with our wiki, which was the other part of my idle plan... Sure, there's FitNesse - but that just solves one problem with yet another wiki to maintain.

So I hacked together an ASP.NET runner for Fit, threw it on our build machine, and then built in a new processing instruction to let OpenWiki forward on a page to this service for processing.

Satisfaction!

In case anyone else has a use for it, here's the code required:

OpenWiki #FITTESTS processing instruction (modify mywiki.asp)

Function MyWikifyProcessingInstructions(pText)
       
   ' other custom processing instructions...
   
   ' Fit integration: detect Fit processing instruction, flag for later processing
   dim FitPI, FitPILen
   FitPI = "#FITTESTS"
   FitPILen = Len(FitPI)
   if m(pText, "\n" & FitPI & "\s+", False, False) Then
      dim lineStart, lineEnd
      lineStart = InStr(pText, FitPI)
      lineEnd = InStr(lineStart, pText, vbCR)
      If lineEnd > lineStart+FitPILen Then
         gFitTestPath = Trim(Mid(pText, lineStart+FitPILen, lineEnd - lineStart - FitPILen))
      End If
      pText = s(pText, "\n" & FitPI & "[^\r\n]*\r*\n", "", False, False)
   End If

   ' other custom processing instructions...
   
    MyWikifyProcessingInstructions = pText
End Function

Additional modifications to mywiki.asp - these actually call the testing web service after the page has been mostly built.

Function MyLastMinuteChanges(pText)

   ' other custom last-minute changes...

   ' Fit integration
   If (gAction = "view" and Len(gFitTestPath) > 0 ) Then
      dim TestResults
      TestResults = RunFitTests(pText, gFitTestPath)
      If ( err.number <> 0 ) then
         pText = "<i>Error running tests: " & err.description & "</i><br />" & pText
      Elseif ( Len(TestResults) = 0 ) then
         pText = "Unknown error running tests" & pText
      Else
         pText = TestResults
      End If
   End If

   MyLastMinuteChanges = pText
End Function

Function RunFitTests(pText, gFitTestPath)
   dim url
   dim verb
   dim form

   ' location of FIT service. Need not be local.
   url = "http://localhost:8088/FitService.ashx"
   verb = "POST"
   form = "ClassPath=" & Server.URLEncode(gFitTestPath) _
      & "&TestData=" & Server.URLEncode(pText)
      
   on error resume next  
   
   dim xmlhttp
   set xmlhttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0")
   if ( xmlhttp is nothing or err.number <> 0 ) then
      err.clear
      set xmlhttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")
   end if
   
   dim xmlDoc
   if ( err.number = 0 ) then
      xmlhttp.open verb, url, false ' synchronous
   end if
   
   if ( err.number = 0 ) then
      xmlhttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" 
      xmlhttp.send form
   end if
   
   ' try to figure out if it worked or not. And if not, why. VBS error handling... yuck.
   dim status
   if ( err.number = 0 ) then
      status = xmlhttp.status
   end if
   
   if (err.number <> 0) then
   elseif (status <> 200) then 
      Err.Raise 65000, "", xmlhttp.statusText & "(" & status & ")", "", 0
   else
      ' clean up Fit html
      RunFitTests = Replace(xmlhttp.ResponseText, "&nbsp;", " ")
      RunFitTests = Replace(RunFitTests, "<br>", "<br/>")
      RunFitTests = Replace(RunFitTests, "<hr>", "<hr/>")
      RunFitTests = Replace(RunFitTests, "<font size=-1", "<font size='-1'")
   end if  
   
   set xmlhttp = nothing  
End Function

FitService.ashx - quick'n'dirty Fit runner. You might want to add some error handling...

<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="FitService" %>

using System;
using System.Web;
using fit;

public class FitService : IHttpHandler
{

   public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
   {
      context.Response.ContentType = "text/html";
      context.Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;

      Fixture.assemblyDirs = context.Request.Form["ClassPath"].Split(new char[]{';'});
      
      Fixture fixture = new Fixture();
      Parse tables = new Parse(context.Request.Form["TestData"]);
      fixture.doTables(tables);
      tables.print(context.Response.Output);
   }

   public bool IsReusable
   {
      get
      {
         return false;
      }
   }
}

With these in place, i can add a line to the beginning of any wiki entry:

#FITTESTS c:\MfgEngineInterface\Current build\

...followed by a table containing the tests, and the tests will be automatically run and their results provided upon page generation.