Slightly Useful Ramblings Of a SDE/T

How do I retrieve a list of all web services on a machine?

2009-10-27T23:16:00Z

If I have a machine say FOO and I want to retrieve all web services on that machine how do I do it? I can use WS-Discovery and I know how to do this with the .NET 4.0 Discovery API. However, the only sample I could find is multicast, which in my use case is not sufficient because:- I already know which machines may be hosting the service. UDP multicast is going to be unreliable given that I have potentially many machines on the network, but I am targetting only a limited subset. Managed mode with...(read more)

Redirecting Standard Error & Output For A Child Process

2009-10-06T03:09:00Z

If your application or library wants to kick off a child process C and you want to redirect standard output and error, this is what you do: ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo (); psi.Arguments = this .CreateArgumentsString(); psi.FileName = this .ImageFile; psi.CreateNoWindow = true ; psi.RedirectStandardError = true ; psi.RedirectStandardInput = true ; psi.RedirectStandardOutput = true ; psi.WorkingDirectory = this .WorkingDirectory; psi.UseShellExecute = false ; Process p = new Process...(read more)

Debuggee Process Terminated Abruptly

2009-10-02T19:32:00Z

I have been getting this error lately when trying to debug a test. I would be stepping over line by line and suddenly the debuggee process will exit suddenly. The proces exits with the error code is -2147023895 (0x800703e9). There are only a few reasons why a process would exit suddenly. One of them is a stack overflow and this error code is exactly that. But, I don't have any recursive or other code that could cause a stack overflow. So what could be the problem? Apparently, when you have implicit...(read more)

IGNORE_DUP_KEY, LINQ & Deadlocks

2008-11-12T06:16:00Z

I am working on a project. The idea is to persist stack trace information for each test failure in a database so that we can automate/facilitate analysis of related test failures. For example, we can query for all tests that fail at a particular method or that have a subset of the given strack trace and so on. This allows testers to easily group together multiple test failures that arise due to the same reason and classify them as a single failure. As I implemented these changes, I used LINQ from...(read more)

Implementing a Custom Test Type - Part 3 (Dissecting the MyTest Sample - 1)

2008-09-20T03:13:00Z

This post deals with the MyTest sample. I will start at the beginning of time. Pre Requisites I copied over the MyTest folder in the Visual Studio SDK to a separate directory. In doing so, I discovered some issues with the MyTestUI project. You will have to open up the MyTestUI.vcproj file in NotePad and replace the "..\..\..\..\VisualStudioIntegration\" parts with PATHTOVSSDK \VisualStudioIntegration. This ensures that the copied over solution builds correctly. Another point to note is that I moved...(read more)

Implementing a Custom Test Type - Part 2

2008-09-17T00:56:00Z

I have been investigating this topic for the past couple of days. Not much progress, but some interesting things to note. It might be an illuminating experience to use .NET Reflector to disassembly and study the unit test type implementation. The relevant assemblies are Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Tips.UnitTest.Adapter Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Tips.UnitTest.AssemblyResolver Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Tips.UnitTest.ObjectModel...(read more)

How To Get Native Processor Architecture

2008-08-21T05:55:00Z

As anyone who has been looking at my blog knows, I have been mostly working on VS integration of the test tools used in our team (apart from setting up and managing TFS for the builds and various other initiatives.) Anyway, so, I started to author a project template for VS. What's a project without a wizard? So, there is a wizard where you input some basic information and it will generate skeleton test classes, test areas, setup the references, the target platform etc. The crux of the issue is, the...(read more)

Implementing a Custom Test Type - Part 1

2008-08-01T22:34:00Z

Introduction This and the next few blog posts will be focussed on implementing a custom test type for Visual Studio 2008. We have an internal tool that our team uses for testing quite extensively and which pre-dates the testing capabilities introduced in Visual Studio. Consequently, we have a considerable investment in our test code. However, given the broad range of other features that the Visual Studio test tools provide, we obviously do not want to lose out on harnessing them. For example, one...(read more)

Ideas For The Next Generation Of Programming Languages

2008-05-29T03:33:00Z

This blog post deals with a vareity of things I feel would be nice to have features in the next generation of programming languages. I keep learning about compiler technology and I am hoping that in the next few years, I will be able to build a compiler for a full fledged language that incorporates the following ideas as well as great ideas from other programming languages. Integrated Factory Pattern This is one feature I have no idea about how to implement. But, it would be nice to have. The idea...(read more)

Duh! InitializeShapeFields is only invoked once!

2008-05-28T09:44:00Z

Beware!!! The method InitializeShapeFields appears in each shape class that is generated by the DSL tools. However, this method is only invoked ONCE per shape. It is due to this code /// <summary> /// Per-class ShapeFields for this shape. /// </summary> public override global ::System.Collections.Generic. IList <DslDiagrams:: ShapeField > ShapeFields { get { if (shapeFields == null ) { shapeFields = CreateShapeFields(); } return shapeFields; } } Note what the comment says. It says...(read more)

Auto Layout Diagram

2008-05-26T15:30:00Z

In the DSL project I am working on, I am performing layout for the model diagram myself. This problem mostly arises because we want two-way synchronization between model and code. Hence, after one of our users has modified the diagram by hand, if we update the model from code, the diagram can get screwed up. The DSL tools do not seem to have any way to direct layout of a model automatically after it is loaded but before it is displayed. If you use the rule engine to layout model shapes using the...(read more)

64 Bits and DSL Tools

2008-05-21T23:01:00Z

The DSL projects created by the DSL package wizard are configured to target AnyCPU .However, if you write a command line tool that references the generated DSL library, you should set up your project to target x86 even if you are working on a 64-bit machine. The reason is that there is no 64 bit version of Visual Studio. Consequently, you will get a type load exception which isn't much help....(read more)

DTE Events Are Different

2008-05-01T06:56:00Z

As I learned today, DTE events are different. Event handlers that are local are marked for garbage collection when the handler goes out of scope. That means the event handler is likely to be fired at most once or never....(read more)

Modifying the Item Context Menu

2008-04-30T09:50:00Z

I was trying to implement an AddIn that modified the context menu for project items. Specifically, C# files. After poking around for a couple of hours, I succeeded. Adding a menu item (or CommandBarControl) is relatively simple. What was complicated was adding it to the right context menu. In my case, the menu I wanted was the Item menu. So you do this with the following code CommandBar cbar = ( GlobalInstanceCache .MainApplication.CommandBars as CommandBars )["Item"]; CommandBarControl ctrl = cbar.Controls.Add(...(read more)

Visual Studio Project Creation Wizard and Templates

2008-04-28T21:05:00Z

I found an interesting feature when creating a Visual Studio project template. (Details about how to create a template is left to a forthcoming post.) I was working on a wizard for the project template. In the IWizard::RunStarted method for the wizard, when you add items to the replacementsDictionary parameter, Visual Studio seems to take the values and substitute them into the template files. This is not surprising since this is what it is advertised to do. What is interesting is the difference...(read more)