Update, 2010-10-23 Note: After reading discussion on Martin Hinshelwood’s blog, I’ve decided to state clear I’m writing here about TFS 2008. Some of the points might not be relevant to TFS 2010.
I’ve been using both Subversion and Team Foundation Server (TFS). Because I first used Subversion and started using TFS afterwards, I had to get used to TFS flavors. I think TFS is great but to be honest there were a few things I missed from Subversion and a few things that really annoyed me when I started using TFS.
So, this is a list of strong and weak points of TFS from the perspective of a developer who switched to it after using Subversion.
Continue reading ‘TFS vs. Subversion’
Note: What is described below applies to Windows Vista x64 (at least I used such OS). I’m not going to describe what to do with a mini dump – how to analyze it in a debugger (e.g. in Visual Studio); such information can be found in a very good article at CodeProject. What I’m going to present here is how to set up Windows Vista so that mini dumps are created when an application crashes, and enforce they are stored locally on the machine on which that happened.
I believe every developer uses debugger while product creation. However it’s also possible to debug the application after it’s delivered to the client. One of such techniques is postmortem debugging – the act of debugging the memory dump of a process, which is stored in a special file (not human readable).
Microsoft has created a special service – Windows Error Reporting. Prior to Vista, Dr. Watson was default Windows application debugger that created crash dumps. Starting with Vista, Microsoft has replaced Dr. Watson with a new, improved mechanism. In short (supposing Windows Error Reporting is enabled), if an application crashes a mini dump (representation of the state of the process) is created. Mini dump is much smaller but still provides plenty of needed information. Depending on settings, a mini dump can be sent to Microsoft for further analysis. This is default behavior which, at least in my case, resulted in no mini dumps stored locally on the machine where the crash took place.
Continue reading ‘Windows Error Reporting – first steps in postmortem debugging – how to collect mini dump?’
I had a load test that used a coded web test. At some point the coded web test changed, i.e. this line was added: Outcome = Outcome.Fail;.
After this change the test stopped working – it always ended with error message: ‘User aborted test run’. Apart from that each iteration of the web test produced MethodAccessException: Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.WebTest.set_Outcome(Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Outcome).
Solution
The reason for the problem was I was using Visual Studio TS 2008 without SP1. Once I installed the SP1, which must have updated mstest, the test started running successfully again.
The key point here is before SP1 Outcome was read-only property, which I learned there.
It’s a fact that coded web test methods give more flexibility to the developer, i.e. common code reuse. So let’s create a coded web test in whose GetRequestEnumerator() method you want to call a common method which tests some other requests. Let’s make it look as GetCommonRequests() in the example below:
public class AWebTest : WebTest
{
private IEnumerator<WebTestRequest> GetCommonRequests()
{
WebTestRequest req1 = new WebTestRequest("http://google.com");
yield return req1;
WebTestRequest req2 = new WebTestRequest("http://google.com");
yield return req2;
}
public override IEnumerator<WebTestRequest> GetRequestEnumerator()
{
WebTestRequest req = new WebTestRequest("http://google.com");
yield return req;
GetCommonRequests();
}
}
You would expect to see three requests in the test result. You will see only one though…
Continue reading ‘How to invoke a common coded web test method from GetRequestEnumerator()?’
A coded web test, as opposed to a basic web test, brings more flexibility to the developer: conditioning, looping, code re-usage, etc. If you haven’t created one yet, you can follow an instruction on MSDN.
Now, because a coded web test can have some logic inside, it makes sense to add logging so that there’s a trace on what’s going on while it executes.
Continue reading ‘How to quickly add logging to a coded web test?’
I wanted to change a load test so that it works similar to what Gabriel Szlechtman described in his blog. Additionally, I followed MSDN instruction on how to create a Load Test Plug-In.
So I created a new project with a plug-in class, added a reference to it from load test project and wanted to hook the plug-in with the test. However, when I was doing the last step I was getting the following error:
Solution
The fix is quite simple. When I added a new class for the plug-in, it was defined without the access modifier (and therefore it was internal), which made the class accessible from other classes only in the same assembly. Adding public access modifier for the plug-in class solved the problem.
When I ran a load test on my environment (Visual Studio TS 2008) for the first time I got the following error:
Error occurred running test. XXX could not access the result repository: Invalid object name ‘LoadTestRun’
Solution
The reason for that was I hadn’t had created a database schema for load tests. In order to do it I executed <VS location>\Common7\IDE\loadtestresultsrepository.sql which did all the job.
Please refer to msdn for more information.
I created a report with SQL Server Reporting Services. It displayed some data and the toolbar with list of checkboxes that defined which columns should be displayed on the report (see the screenshot below). The problem was the font on the toolbar didn’t match the font on the report, i.e. it was huge in comparison to the report. In short it needed resizing…
Continue reading ‘Reporting Services – how to change font style in the toolbar of ReportViewer?’
Writing comments is something you need to get used to; sooner or later you will understand it’s worth writing comments. Haven’t you find yourself in a sitation where you don’t understand what a couple of lines of YOUR OWN code do? I have…
XML documentation comments are also important, particularly for public members/methods. Even if your project doesn’t require generating full XML documentation of the code, using Intellisense can be much more effective if it summarizes the method you are trying to use. If you want to generate XML documentation for C# in the twinkling of an eye you MUST install Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc plugin for Visual Studio. Let me cite the author:
Continue reading ‘Robust generation of XML documentation comments for C#’
The beginning of the stack trace I got today looked as below:
2009-05-19 11:01:45,078 ERROR [5232] XXX - Speaker already deleted: Castle.ActiveRecord.Framework.ActiveRecordException: Could not perform Delete for Speaker ---> NHibernate.Exceptions.GenericADOException: could not delete collection: [XXX#XXX][SQL: SQL not available] ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'SpeakerId', table 'XXX.dbo.lnk_Session_Speaker'; column does not allow nulls. UPDATE fails.
The statement has been terminated.
...
at SpeakerProxy3e9fd3b0e82745c2b91b8a353acaa93d.DeleteAndFlush()
Background
I had three tables and classes representing them: Session / app_Session, Speaker / app_Speaker, and SessionSpeaker / lnk_Session_Speaker.
Continue reading ‘Castle.ActiveRecord.Framework.ActiveRecordException: Could not perform Delete for XXX —> NHibernate.Exceptions.GenericADOException: could not delete collection’
