I won Free Typemock Isolator license

TypeMock said 50 first bloggers will get full license and they stood up in their word!

I will be checking this application

DENIM - An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design

DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming.

I found this tool while I wanted to create a small sketch of an idea I have for a new site (Visio was hardly good), after couple of minutes of usage (without any Pen) I can say that it is a very nice idea but a little hard to manage and I would suggest to buy a Pen to ease the design process.

At the end I went back a painted what I wanted on a piece of paper <smile />

TypeMock special offering for isolator

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

CruiseControl.NET MultipleTrigger failure when using with AND operator

During my work with Cruise Control .NET I was required to created dependency between projects in a way that I have the following hierarchy

The steps and explanations are:

1. Compile the setup of the project
2. Install the setup (that contain few types of roles) on 3 servers in parallel
3. After above 3 projects finished run test program (integration test) on system.

I thought it would be very simple because I know that the current implementation of Cruise Control .NET has MultipleTrigger class already implemented that allows creating trigger on several project with OR / AND operator.

After doing the ccnet.config configuration I tested it and found that project "Entire system" didn't start after all three project were completed successfully (actually its was random with more occasions that it didn't work).

After investigation I realized that there is a basic implementation problem because even when using AND operator the triggers were iterated one by one BUT if one of the triggers didn't create Integration Request than the multiple Trigger would return NULL and stop the iteration which in our case it would mean the the internal project triggers would even run one time so actually they don't have initial status (limitation).

I fixed this issue and thought it would fix everything but than I continued and found that although I fire the triggers one by one because I use Project Trigger if it is fire and returns Integration Request the next call would return NULL if the threshold (internal interval Trigger) wasn't  met (to make things simpler this means that unless I have a situation that all triggers return Integration Request at once the response would be NULL --> nothing would be built)

My fix now had to be in a way that all the trigger would be fired at the same bulk and actually cause the get project status action so I decided to set the internal triggers to be 1 second each and added new internal interval trigger that will be used as threshold and set it to 10 seconds.

So now I have MultipleTrigger2 class that actually fire the internal triggers at once every 10 seconds (should be configurable)

At the end I also added a new flag that will enable me to trigger the internal trigger on first run rather than wait 10 seconds.

* important to say that because I am using Project Trigger as the internal triggers and it has a limitation that it doesn't have the initial state until first run (I think I am going to add state persistent to Cruise Control .NET implementation)

Because I will patch the original Cruise Control .NET I decided to add it to my CCE project.

Needless to say that everything seems to work :) (This post should save you more than 5 hours of HARD work)

Simian (Similarity Anlyzer)

Finally I had time to test drive a tool that was sitting in my tools bag called Simian (Similarity Analyzer) that is responsible for identifies duplication in Java, C#, C, C++, COBOL, Ruby, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, Visual Basic, Groovy source code and even plain text files.

I ran it  (with no special exclusion) using the following command line:

Simian.exe -includes=**/*.cs  -formatter=xml:simian.xml

Which actually iterate on all C# files recursively. I would suggest to exclude relevant files to reduce noise (E.g. Dynamic content like designer...).

After few SECONDS It found more than 1000 lines of code that are duplicates on an old project I had laying(pretty big).

Needless to say I was shocked, so I checked part of the files and I actually found pretty basic things that were copied as part of unit tests and parameter tests.

If you want to integrate it to Cruise Control.NET using NAnt task that you can see this page

CruiseControl.NET & batch's %ERRORLEVEL%

I wanted to do a very simple thing using CruiseControl.NET - have a batch file that does some work be executed in my project and if error level is not "0" fail the test.

I started by creating a very simple Project with the Exec task that execute batch file called BuildHub.bat (for the sake of demo):

<project name="HUB" queue="SR_GUI">
  <workingDirectory>c:\temp</workingDirectory>
  <artifactDirectory>c:\temp</artifactDirectory>
  <sourcecontrol type="nullSourceControl" />
  <triggers>
    <projectTrigger project="SP Build" />
  </triggers>
  <tasks>
    <exec executable="BuildHub.bat" />
  </tasks>
</project>

 

The batch looks something like this:

@echo off

echo provision drive

... some lines script ...

Echo Debug: Error level = %ERRORLEVEL%

 

I started to check the project by running it and although I knew it should fail (I saw the debug note about error level = 9002) it always reported as succeeded.

initially I tough that because I used last action of echo then it might reset the error level but this wasn't the case (validated by running manually)

To make a long story short the resolution was to simply put the following line at the end of the batch:

Exit /B %ERRORLEVEL%

As always I hope this save you some time

Just bought Acer aspire one

Well today me and my wife went to the shopping mall with another couple of friend and we spotted the Acer Aspire One laptop,

I always wanted to buy my wife this little kind of laptop to help her in her job (Sport personal trainer) and finally we bought it at the prices of 2250 NIS which is 590 $.

Its now being charged and I cant wait to jump start it.

Over all I am very happy BUT I know that this little computer cost 50% in USA.... (too bad I cant wait) :)