I want VS to deploy the latest version of the WCF every time I run my tests.
Currently I have to deploy manually, or run the WCF Service, for it to be deployed.
I'm looking for a functionality similar to starting multiple projects when debugging.
Maybe to specify the behaviour I am missing right now. I can not set breakpoints inside the webservice, as it's not run in debug-mode.
#codespike Using standard unit testing in VS2012
#codespike With Deploy I mean "copy latest version to local IIS, so it can be respond
to calls over the web.
#mayo Yes! that is a brilliant suggestion. Bypassing the Coding and Decoding (webtransport) phase, and go straight to the classes that manipulate the data.
Related
I created a WCF project using the IIS model. I then created unit tests which reference services from that project. Now when I start the unit test, the service is not hosted and thus I get EndpointNotFoundExceptions. When I simply hit F5 everything works fine and the IIS Express comes up in tray.
I checked the option "Always start when debugging" in the property-pane of the service-project and it is set to true.
A Unit Test is a unit test. If you need another process for it (namely some IIS or other web server) it's no longer a closed unit. If you want to test your service when it's hosted, I'd suggest you host it in your test yourself. Check self-hosting services. Then you have control about what class is hosted when and where. For example, you may want a different URL for your unit test and you may want to inject a different data layer so your tests don't need anything outside your unit, like a database.
You are not doing unit testing, and you are actually doing integration testing, since your test suit has no direct knowledge/binding of the service codes and it is just a client program of the service.
Both unit testing and integration testing contribute to good QA. Generally you should create unit testing which directly test the service codes through in process binding interfaces, and make sure it has comprehensive code coverage.
Then create integration testing using MS Test, NUnit or xUnit as test harness, in order to test some run time behaviors of the service.
What puzzle you is that how to make the test suit in the same VS sln run while the service should be running in debug mode. There could be a few solutions:
Build the test suit using Nunit or xUnit, then run the test suit outside VS IDE which is running the service in Debug mode. Actually MS Test could support as well, but only in command line mode.
Host the service in IIS, and you have a batch files to copy assemblies and web.config to there upon every update. Then attach the service codes with respective w3wp.exe instance.
If you just want to test rather than debug, there could be another solution: Use IIS Express. You use either C# codes or batch file to launch IIS Express with the service during tearing up, and close IIS Express when tearing down.
hey everyone.
ok, a little background to the project... I've released a program to a couple clients that use a WCF service for them to connect to our servers in the office. Being that i used the clickOnce setup utility in VS2010, when i am doing testing on a VM i publish to a different spot on the server as to not give untested code to clients. However, the WCF service only gets published to one place for both versions (development and release).
What i'm working on now requires a change to the WCF service as a couple additional things get transferred between client and server. If I publish the modified WCF, will it affect the current clients, or will i be able to test my development version with no worries? I'm afraid i already know that the answer will be, yes it will affect them.
thanks!
dave k.
Isolation of test, dev and production:
Whenever you need to test something or put it in production, you need a separate environment. So you need a separate machine to develop and do local testing, another to test the checked-in code (for use by a tester, a customer etc.), and another to run the production code -- at the very least.
If your service interacts with other software, especially with software that gets updated a lot, this is an important way to make sure that you don't introduce side-effects and that what you build will be compatible with what is running on your production server.
So: isolate and make your test environment a "clone" of your production environment.
Two versions in parallel:
If you update your own code for customer X, you can still host a previous version of your production code for customer Y on another (virtual?) server. Customer Y can then choose when to switch to your new version, after which you can take the old code out of production.
You should create a seperate VM for your test environment.
I'm currently setting up a new build server and I'm interested in any suggestions the community may have about software such as Hudson or CruiseControl.NET that may simplify and add additional value to the build process.
Previously I had a build server set up using custom batch files which would run msbuild and other such tools and these were triggered by subversion hooks to allow for a continuous builds to be done per branch. The idea was that eventually we would also execute automated tests and/or static analysis although we never really got that far. This server also acted as our source code repository, a test machine for web project builds, and a web server for custom dashboard and portal for developers on the team.
At this point my thoughts are to separate some of the responsibilities of the old build server and at least a Build Server which is responsible only for creating builds, a web server which is responsible for acting as the intranet style dashboard site for developers, and perhaps an additional web server as the Subversion repository. If it turns out to be better or easier to keep the Subversion code on the same server as SvnServe then I'll probably opt to place the Subversion repository on the web server but still keep the build server separate. Having no personal experience with any of the popular build server and CI solutions out there I'm curious how CruiseControl.NET, Hudson or other solutions would fit into this type of configuration. It appears that both of CC.NET and Hudson have web interfaces for example but the documentation doesn't clearly layout how this plays out with different hardware/system configurations so I'm not sure if either requires the web portion to be on the build server itself or not.
As far as technologies I'm dealing with .NET/C# based code which is a mix of Web/WinForms/WPF and we use a few separate Subversion repositories to host these projects. Additionally it would be nice to support Visual FoxPro and Visual Source Safe for some legacy applications. I would also like to get more team members involved in monitoring builds and would like to eventual have developers create build setups for their own projects as well with as much simplicity as possible. Also I should mention that I have no experience setting up a Java based web application in IIS but I do have quite a bit of experience setting up and managing ASP.NET applications so if that may make .NET based products more favorable unless I can be convinced otherwise.
UPDATE (after researching Hudson): After all the recommendations for Hudson I started looking into what is involved to get it up and running on my two Windows 2008 servers. From what I can gather the web portion (master) would run on my webserver but it seems that IIS isn't supported so this would greatly complicate things since I want to host it on the same machine as my other web applications. On the build server, I would be installing a second copy of Hudson that would act as a slave and only perform builds that are delegated to it by the master. To get this to work I would be installing Hudson as a Windows Service and would also need to install some unix compatibility utilities. Unfortunately the UnxUtils download link appears to be broken when I checked as well so I can't really move forward until I get that resolved. All of this is really sounding just as complex if not more complex than installing CruseControl.NET. For now this unfortunately leaves me to looking into CruiseControl.NET and TeamCity.
UPDATE (about TeamCity): After looking into TeamCity a little closer I realized that at least the server portion is also written in Java and is deployed in a manner very similar to Hudson. Fortunately it appears that Tomcat can be used to host servlets inside IIS although I can't find a good straight forward guide to describe how to actually do accomplish this. So skipping that for now I looked further when I ran into what looks like what might be a major snag.
TeamCity Professional edition only
supports TeamCity Default
Authentication and does not support
changing the authentication scheme.
Since windows authentication is likely the direction we will want to go, it's now looking like it might be back to evaluating CruiseControl.NET or possibly Hudson if I can get my hands on the UnxUtils and also find out more about how I can host the dashboard portion of Hudson within my existing IIS configuration. Any pointers?
UPDATE (about Jenkins): I ended up experimenting enough with Hudson that I ended up with a reasonable build server setup that I'm happy with and that can be extended to do much more if I need. Of course I went the rout of converting to Jenkins once Oracle took over Hudson and Jenkins is what I'm using today with little bits of powershell to help tie things together. I'm very happy with this approach right now and besides being Java based, Jenkins has quite a bit of support for other development environments such as .NET and MSBuild.
I'd vote for TeamCity here. Its is very, very easy to get stood up and running, integrates with all your .NET stuff without any trouble. The builds themselves are run by agents which can be on the build server or another machine depending on requirements--they could even be on a machine running an entirely different OS on a different network in a different country.
I highly recommend using Hudson. Not only will it allow you to build .NET applications on a continual basis, but you can also run code analysis and unit tests as well. It's easy to install (just deploy a WAR file to a web server such as Tomcat) and has many configuration options. There is also a large number of plugins available that you can use, many written by other Hudson users. Best of all, it is free and actively supported.
For our decision making process we started with following overview.
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix
Our main objective was java, easy to configure/use even after nobody created a job for 6 months. We moved away from a old version of Cruise Control, since nobody really knew how to use it. Some of the commercial products are nice if you want to go beyond just continuous integration. Have a look and decide for yourself.
Be careful, I don't know how up to date this matrix is. So some of the projects might have implemented more functions right now.
An interesting alternative could be Jira studio by Atlasian. If you use the hosted version you don't have much on support issues and it comes with subversion, bamboo, and goodies (jira+greenhopper, confluence, crucible, fisheye). http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/
I agree with Wyatt Barnett. TeamCity is the best choice. It is very easy to configure and use. Moreover, TeamCity has a Free Professional Edition. Previously we used CruiseControl.NET on our project. This is also a powerful tool, but it is very complicated and hard to understand.
What s.ermakovich said: Both TeamCity and Hudson separate the web UI from build agents. You shouldn't need to install IIS on a build agent. You'd need to install a JVM and the agent software on any build node - very straightforward.
I have a scenario where I have to setup a test environment where I want to be able to tell my NAnt or other build tool to make an new IIS web application, put the latest bins in the newly created IIS web application, and post me an email where the new address and port where the new application are addressed, is this possible and how? which tool?
There are several ways to approach this:
Set up a continuous integration (CI) server on the test environment. This is a viable option if your test environment machine doesn't change often and it's a single machine.
Push the installation from your development machine using tools like PsExec
Combination of the two: you have a build CI server which pushes the installation to (multiple) test environments.
Of course, you also need a good build script which will set up the IIS application (NAnt offers tasks for this). Emailing to you can be done by CI server (CruiseControl.NET Email Publisher, Hudson...).
I suggest taking some time to read this excellent article series: Automation for the people: Deployment-automation patterns
Our CruiseControl .Net build server does exactly this as part of it's NAnt build-script process...
Once the code is retrieved from source control, it's all built/compiled in turn. Web projects are then handled slightly differently to normal .dlls, as they are deployed to a particular folder (either on the current machine or otherwise) where IIS (also set-up by the script) to serve the pages.
Admittedly, we're using Virtual Directories instead of creating and disposing of new website instances on the server, as otherwise we'd have to manage the port numbers for each website.
NAnt has the capabilities of doing all of this IIS work, as well as all of the email work too - I'd certainly recommend looking at this avenue of enquiry to solve your problem. Plus, you also get the continous integration aspect as a side-benefit in your case!
I am in the process of setting up some IIS hosted WCF projects for continuous integration and am stuck trying to find the best and simplest way to get deployment automated.
Right now, I have the build and deploy working with CC.NET, MSBUILD and a batch file that copies the necessary files to the deployment folder, but I think there must be a better way.
Ideally, I'd like something like web deployment projects, but for WCF.
I would settle for a nice Power Shell script to copy all the necessary files and exclude all the fluff.
Well, there isn't anything stopping you from using a web deployment project for hosting your WCF class library. The SVC file will be picked up by IIS and routed appropriately. We use a standard deployment project and a custom action to create the IIS vroot so that we have a finer control over the settings but a standard web deployment project will do the job as well.
Unless you are running under IIS7 then as far as IIS is concerned it's just standard content that has it's own handler. When you get to Windows 2008 / Windows 7 Beta then things can change a bit as those versions have a very different handler model.
I've found this post to be really helpful: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx
This depends very much on the technologies you are using. On a previous project, we used TFS, with Team Build. The result was that the WCF projects were built into a folder structure that matched their deployment structure. Additional tasks in the MSBUILD script triggered a deployment script (written in PERL, I think). This took care of all deployment tasks, from deleting old folders, creating the new, creating databases and populating with reference data, then deploying the service and web sites, and finally running Installation Verification scripts and publishing the results to a web site.
On the other hand, if all you've got is a hammer, then hammer away.