Category: TeamCity

Tips for Deploying your .Net project

Over the last 20 years I’ve seen many a deployment, some good, some bad and the ugly, life’s too short for manual/long deployments.

Here is what I recommend

If you have manual steps in your deployments then stop it, now, no seriously, you can deploy with zero manual steps (clicking deploy doesn’t count).

What to do instead

Get yourself TeamCity, yes TeamCity, Jenkins is ok but you get what you pay for, trust me Jenkins isn’t TeamCity. Ok now that you have an excellent build server, you’ll want to script your builds, for this I liked using psake along with PowerShell, honestly people who don’t know PowerShell are missing out, its awesome.

So get your scripts together and kick the builds off from TeamCity using psake.

Unit Test your PowerShell Scripts

Using Pester you can unit test your PowerShell scripts, thus realising that their fragile or poorly written or just large function which are hard to test, well do yourself a favour and use pester to unit test them.
Pester also gives you code coverage for your PowerShell scripts

Deploy your app

To deploy any .Net app use Octopus Deploy, its easy, its painless, it deploys with error handling, rollback using transactions, and you can do blue/green deployments, if you want to deploy a previous release, one click, deploy to multiple environments, any previous version etc. all in one click.

Summary
To summarise, no more manual steps, no copying files, manually unzipping files, creating folders etc, – no need to do that, and leads to human error, highly recommend each of those tools.



Code coverage results for your JavaScript

I wanted to find out if there were any tools that can display code coverage results for JavaScript code (without the need for Java on the server or having to use Node), I experimented with a few different frameworks, test runners and what not and have spent a couple of hours looking in to this, in the end I opted for the following:-

jasmine_logo At work we currently use Jasmine which is a behaviour-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code along with PhantomJS which we use to run the tests using a specrunner (there are several ways to do it but this works for now)

I have installed the Visual Studio Extension called Chutzpah which is a JavaScript Test Runner which gives you a few nice things such as integration with TeamCity and the ability to right-click and then select Run Tests similarly to unit testing your C# code with your favourite unit testing framework.

chutzpah

Ok so back to code coverage for our JavaScript code – Matthew the guy who created Chutzpah is working on integrating code coverage into the next release so in the mean time here is how you get it to work – enter one further library called Blanket.js – Blanket.js is used to give us the code coverage results and currently supports Qunit, Mocha and Jasmine. An adapter API exists for supporting other test runners.

At this point you might be thinking its a fair amount of work to get this going but I will simplify the steps required to get your JavaScript code outputting code coverage results.

  • Download Blanket.js and look for the file called blanket-jasmine.js, add this to your Scripts folder inside your web application. This file is blanket version that works with Jasmine.
  • Add the Nuget package jasmine.js jasminenuget
  • Add some JavaScript code as below for example this is code.js
  • [sourcecode language=”csharp”] var stringLib = {
    vowels: function (a) {
    count = 0;
    for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
    if ("aeiou".indexOf(a[i]) > -1) {
    count++;
    }
    }
    return count;
    }
    }
    var mathLib = {
    add5: function (a) {
    return a + 5;
    },
    mult5: function (a) {
    return a * 5;
    }
    }
    [/sourcecode]
  • Add a JavaScript file with your Jasmine tests for the code above like so :-
    [sourcecode language=”csharp”] describe("general", function () {
    it("A basic test", function () {
    expect(true).toBeTruthy();
    var value = "hello";
    expect("hello").toEqual(value);
    });
    });

    describe("stringLib", function () {
    it("will get vowel count", function () {
    var count = stringLib.vowels("hello");
    expect(count).toEqual(2);
    });
    });

    describe("mathLib", function () {
    it("will add 5 to number", function () {
    var res = mathLib.add5(10);
    expect(res).toEqual(15);
    });

    it("will multiply 5 to number", function () {
    var res = mathLib.mult5(10);
    expect(res).toEqual(50);
    });
    });
    [/sourcecode]

  • Ok so we have some JavaScript code and Jasmine tests for the code, lets add some required links to our Jasmine specrunner page so we can see the code coverage
    results output to the screen, edit the spec runner like so:-

    specrunner2

    The above screen shot shows that we have added a reference to both our JavaScript code file and the file containing the Jasmine tests.

  • Now if we browse to the specrunner page for Jasmine we will see the results of the test – green for passed and red for failed (no code coverage results yet).

    jasmineresults1

  • Now lets show the JavaScript code coverage results – which is as simple as adding in the line to reference Blanket for Jasmine:-

    specrunner3

  • Refresh the specrunner page and you will now see your JavaScript code coverage results like so:-

    specrunner4

    The screen shot above shows us 100% code coverage, so no lines of JavaScript are coloured red (not covered)

  • If I comment out one of the tests we can see the difference below:-
    specrunner5
  • And there we have it code coverage results of your JavaScript, brief post but enough to get you started I hope, next time I will add this to TeamCity and see what that gives us.


What I learned last week – July 23-27th

This is the first in a series I am going to do on what I learned last week – it will cover what I’ve been up to and what I have read and learnt throughout the week – ok let’s get started.

Found a really nice sample on how to notify users when an action on your site has taken place – say you save a record or delete a record, perhaps you need to show a validation message, maybe even a banner at the top that has to stay there,

Take a look at the oh so simple to use JQuery plugin called Notify.

Awesome Stuff

  • Visual Studio 2012 is really nice to use! – you should take a look now if you havent already.
  • Shout out to the guys at RavenDb highly recommend it, also note its FREE until you need to release to production, so if you’re doing demos, needing a quick win on a project – take it for a spin.
  • Resharper 7 is out – if you’re not already using this then do yourself a favour, why walk when you can run, go try it now Resharper 7.
  • Redgate have brought out a plugin for setting up a database build in TeamCity Redgate TeamCity Plugin

Please leave a comment after the beep.



AspConf – My Review

Last week we had AspConf – “aspConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: showcasing the ASP.NET stack as the platform for great web applications.

Over 2 days they had 5 virtual rooms used to present lots of fascinating stuff on .Net, including talks about all manner of things in the Asp.Net world.

The sessions on both days covered topics such as, Async in .Net 4.5, Glimpse, TDD, Azure and Cloud Computing and lots lots more, you can read more about the sessions here.

Although it had some technical difficulties, due to its popularity I may add, the conference is an awesome way to learn for free – and free is always good. It’s a superb way to learn about content you havent had time to look at it, or new technologies you havent heard of. Hopefully next year they might try to use something different from livemeeting.

If you missed any of the session then fret not, most of them if not all of them were recorded and put up on Channel 9 here

I only managed to see sessions from day 2 so I am off to go watch more content on Channel 9 – a great resource for free learning.