In my current project we have reached a very good code coverage percent (98,7 %, yes we are proud) - but we are aspiring to take it a step further.

We are now constructing a series of integration test, used to run through the actual production code an verifying that everything works as expected.

Said and done - I implemented a few test that did that. Soon though some questions and problems arose;

• Integration test assumes that something is released and the that tests are executed against that release
• You don’t want the integration test to be executed when a developer is running the unit test on his development machine inside Visual Studio.

When looking around on the net it seems that many people are missing the Category-attribute from NUnit in MSTest. That looked like a very nice way to solve the problem but...

We have for several days now been chasing a bug for a couple of days now. Very, very annoying…

Here is how it goes:

We have a unit test on that calls a stored procedure in Oracle, using ODP.NET. On our local machine (and also on the test server) everything works fine. But when the build script is running the unit test, an out-parameter of the DATE-datatype was always returned as NULL.

This was so strange since it’s the same code against the same database instance. The difference was that it was another account, the TFS Build Service Account, that was running the tests.

The solution was to configure the regional settings for the TFS Build Service Account to use Swedish (in our case) Regional Settings as the default user profile.

[UPDATED] That checkbox should be checked!

So good to solve this. Thanks to the anonymous “client dude” that...

First and foremost- I love Resharper (4.0), but I think that some small flaws are still there and does bad things…

Two things are at the top of my list (in all honesty I must admit that I can’t be 100% sure that ReSharper has to do with this but both of them has occurred after I’ve installed ReSharper):

• ASPX-pages are very, very slow to load in design-mode. It can take about a minute to switch from the html-code to the design-view
• The Build supervisor (you know, the view where you stare at the progress of the build, keep your fingers crossed and hopes for only green dots…) crashes very frequently.

I have reported these bugs to ReSharper and hope that a fix will be available to fix this. I still love Resharper though.

Oh yeah - that’s right - I found that the TFS Web...

One of the really cool features of WCF is the possibility to be able to change binding in the config… Of course the transport need to be supported by the host. For example you can’t use TCP/IP transport in a web-site hosted service.

So - you’ll have to create the host by yourself - self hosting. However there are some nasty configuration to be done in order to get the service to work. Otherwise you’ll get this error message:

HTTP could not register URL http://+:[yourport]

Here is an article from Microsoft describing how to get it to work. And here is another article describing how to solve it

In my last post I mentioned the great WCF service/client configuration editor that ships with Visual Studio 2008. I haven’t used it much but rather done “it” by hand - which has been quite painful from time to time.

Here is a great introduction to the editor that shows off some of the great capabilities of it.

Another “tip”, if you like, that I found on my way through the configuration jungle is that the binding part is complete separated from the other part of the configuration. Also, the client and server binding should be configured the same way (at least for a single endpoint). This means, and is actually quite effective, that you can copy the binding part from one .config-file to another to get the same configuration. An easy but very helpful tip.

This area is (in the words of Juval Löwy) “truly vast”. And as I read somewhere else most of the properties doesn’t make sense to the common programmer. We (yeah, I’m one of the common ones) just want it to work.

Also, when it comes to configuring WCF services Microsoft has gone the complete opposite way from their normal way of doing things; normally Microsoft hides everything you don’t need to know from you and you’ll have to dig to get to the advanced things. When it comes to WCF all the possible values are shown right off - scared the living daylights of of me. Just add a reference to a WCF-service and check your client .config-file.

So what to do - well I’m sorry but you’ll need to know quite a bit of information, here are some resources that I have found useful:

• The book Read More

Yes - I know that this is quite rare but if you want something really easy in place then this is how to use wsHttpBinding with no security:

<services>
  <service name="FaktureringsTjanst"
    <endpoint
      address=""
      binding="wsHttpBinding"
      bindingConfiguration="myBindingConfigurationWsHttp"
      contract="IContract"
      behaviorConfiguration="FaktureringsTjanstBehavior" \>
  </service>
</services>

<!-- Bindings -->
<bindings>
  <wsHttpBinding>
  <binding
    name="myBindingConfigurationWsHttp"
    maxReceivedMessageSize="500000"
    sendTimeout="00:05:00"
    receiveTimeout="00:05:00">
  <security mode="None">
  <message clientCredentialType="None" \>
  </security>
  </binding>
  </wsHttpBinding>
</bindings>

I found a very nifty little feature of MSBuild, that is really helpful when it comes to structuring your build file.

In MSBuild the “sub-routines” are called targets and works just like expected, that is you can call the targets and invoke them in the order you like. BUT, there are no way of sending parameters to them - which at first are very hard to understand.

From this article I learned how to do it. And it’s not to hard. But it’s a bit of a hack… in my opinion.

Actually it’s easier to describe it as it’s intended from the outset, to call targets in other files. Imagine that you create a MSBuild-file called DeployScript.proj with a target called DeployIt. In order to deploy to different environments we use some variables that instructs MSBuild to deploy to different paths for example. Like the $(PublishWebSitePath) in...

My current project has been crazy intensive with some really really tight time-schedules but they are coming to a close soon. This has made me down-priorities the blogging to a minimum.

I’ll try to do some write up to get some of my “findings” in here.

The last week marked a significant step in this year for the Vasa Band. We released our brand new CD Priority (as I wrote about here) and also embarked on a small tour of the western part of Sweden.

The tour was great - and the greatest part about it was the way we felt that our message was received and understood. It’s always good to be on a tour, especially with this band, but this was something else; we had really worked hard on getting the message about Jesus across and crystal clear and it seems as it worked.

I am right now editing some of the recorded music and it doesn’t sound to bad either. Hopefully some of it will be posted on the Vasa Band homepage in a while.

Oh yeah - I became sick on the last day, and the journey home was...