Toluu : Kiwidude's Geek Spot

Kiwidude's Geek Spot

Ramblings about NCoverExplorer, .Net development and other geek toys

NCover v2.0.1 (with NCoverExplorer v2.0)September 19 2007: Woah, what's this? You wait six months for the next NCoverExplorer bus to arrive and then two come along at once? Even better, there is a bright and shiny new NCover 2.0.1 to go with it...

Peter Waldschmidt nicely summarises in the new NCover blog his thoughts and rationale behind the decision to transition to a commercialised product. We've been talking about the combined possibilities for a little while now until the timing came right for Peter to make it all happen and start the Gnoso team.

For my part, I'm excited at what this means for the future of both products. Peter and his team have a long list of ideas and enhancements to really drive NCover forward and enhance it's existing reputation as the leading tool for .NET code coverage analysis. This opens up even more possibilities for new features for the NCoverExplorer tools to further improve their ability to deliver quality information to developers. Most importantly, the new business model Peter has put in place offers the necessary resources to ma
NCoverExplorer... v1.4.0September 16 2007: I've had this "quietly available" on the download page for a few weeks to gain feedback on any issues and with no known issues outstanding it seems appropriate to more publicly announce it.

A big change in NCoverExplorer 1.4.0 is that it is no longer published under the GPL license. I made this change for a number of reasons; amongst which was the concern that a number of companies have of deploying GPL based tools into their development process. This roadblock has been removed and should no longer prevent your companies from using this toolset.

My original choice of GPL was based on using the ICSharpCode 1.x texteditor control. I have now dropped that component in favour of using the superior (but commercial) Actipro SyntaxEditor control instead. The improvements are not only in stability and features but also visual as you can see below in the code highlighting screenshot. A splitter window is available as also shown.

So why should you upgrade to NCoverExplorer 1.4?

This release is less about adding new features (although there are some to be found) and more about stabilisation for the future. The core model code has been rewritten and better tested. There h
CruiseControl.Net... Release 1.3.0 With Integration QueuesJune 22 2007: Some of you may remember this post from last October about a patch I made for serialising builds in CruiseControl.Net. Owen Rogers was kind enough to give me the "keys to the kingdom" to get this integrated into the main CC.Net branch and as of today it is now officially released in CC.Net 1.3.0.

Having had several pair sessions watching Owen "fly" with Resharper was a great experience - many thanks Owen for the effort in getting the final release out as it can't be easy with new baby and work pressures!

As I said from the very beginning this particular iteration doesn't solve everyone's problems of complex build dependencies, nor was any attempt made to do so. However applying the 80/20 rule it appeared many people were like us with the simpler "this project should never build at the same time as this project" requirement. This implementation should do that just fine with a few bells and whistles such as viewing queue contents, controlling the build order and cancelling pending builds...

We have been using the nightly builds of 1.3 for quite a number of months now and it has proven solid from our experiences with it. There are of course further enhancements tha
NCover Problems / Fixes - Part 2April 19 2007: In Part 1 of my "everything you wanted to know about NCover but were afraid to ask" series I covered the basics of how NCover works and profiler registration issues. Let's hit another of the most common problems:

Empty Coverage.xml File

This is quite an interesting one, as there are a number of possible causes. You perform your coverage run and don't see any errors in the console output. Yet when you open your coverage.xml file you see something like this from NCover 1.5.7.
<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheethref="coverage.xsl"type="text/xsl"?>

<coverageprofilerVersion="1.5.7 Beta"driverVersion="1.5.7.0"
startTime="2007-04-19T18:38:47+01:00"measureTime="2007-04-19T18:38:47.921875+01:00"/>If using an earlier version of NCover the x
NCover Problems / Fixes - Part 1April 18 2007: From time to time I try to chip in with support on the NCover forums, not only with NCoverExplorer issues but NCover as well since they are so dependent. There are a bunch of issues which come up repeatedly, particularly for people new to using NCover.

In a perfect world (future release?) NCover itself could offer some more helpful error messages, but where is the fun in that? For now at least it is more a case of deciphering the clues from the console output and coverage.log files.

Hopefully this series of posts may help a few people and reduce the times I end up repeating myself on the forums, so win-win if it works for you. My examples will use NCover 1.5.7. You should also take a look at the NCover FAQ which is included in your installation. I've got a copy here too if that helps...

Profiled process terminated. Profiler connection not established.

Easily the most common problem people stumble on. As shown below your application starts (in this case unit tests), but after a delay of 60 seconds or so you get this message.

>E:\apps\NCover\ncover.console.exe E:\apps\nunit\nunit-console.exe MyTests.dll
NCover.Console v1.5.7 - Code Coverage Analysis for .NET - http://ncover.org
Personally for my applications I remov