Author: Marcel (Page 2 of 16)

Devintersection sessions

22 November 2016 / Marcel / 0 Comments

Last week I presented two talks at Devintersection europe. My first talk was about Modern Application architectures and you can find the pdf of the deck here

the second session was on Cross browser testing of web applications using CodedUI. I also have the pdf of the deck available here

And here are the two demo’s I showed to build maintainable test automation using Page Objects and the concept of DAMP testing (Descriptive And Meaningful Phrases).

Search Google

MVC Music Store

Also if you want to learn more about CodedUI, you can also watch one of my two courses I build for Pluralsight here:Test Automation with CodedUI Pluralsight which explains in detail all that can be done with CodedUI and Testing Web Applications with CodedUI Pluralsight which is focused on testing web applications.

Hope this helps!

How to fix “Error: This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified. Error count: 1”

2 November 2016 / Marcel / 9 Comments

In my previous post about Deploying ASP.NET 4.5 to Docker on Windows I forgot to mention that you might run into an issue when running webdeploy.

Julian Perrott, commented on my post and asked if this is an issue. I think it is an issue and that the install does not complete correctly. But there is an easy fix for this as well. What you can do is add a small PowerShell script to your Docker image and run that after the first attempt to deploy the website. Then the next step is to run the script to fix the ACL’s and then again run web deploy. I have not yet tried this on the latest Windows server 2016 bits, but on the Technical preview 5 this worked like a charm.

You need the following script to fix the ACL’s:

$path = "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MvcMusicStore_deploy"
$acl = Get-Acl $path
Set-Acl $path $acl

$path = "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MvcMusicStore_deploy"

$acl = Get-Acl $path

Set-Acl $path $acl

This script doe nothing more then getting the ACL on the path and then re-apply it. this will make windows fix the ACL and make them in canonical form again.

You can add this to your dockerfile and make it part of your standard install of a website in your release pipeline.

FROM windowsserveriisaspnetwebdeploy 
RUN mkdir c:\webapplication
WORKDIR /webapplication
ADD fixAcls.ps1 /MvcMusicStore/fixAcls.ps1
ADD dockerdeploydemo.zip  /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.zip
ADD dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd
ADD dockerdeploydemo.SetParameters.xml /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.SetParameters.xml
RUN dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd, /Y
RUN powershell.exe -executionpolicy bypass .\fixAcls.ps1
RUN dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd, /Y

FROM windowsserveriisaspnetwebdeploy

RUN mkdir c:\webapplication

WORKDIR /webapplication

ADD fixAcls.ps1 /MvcMusicStore/fixAcls.ps1

ADD dockerdeploydemo.zip /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.zip

ADD dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd

ADD dockerdeploydemo.SetParameters.xml /webapplication/dockerdeploydemo.SetParameters.xml

RUN dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd, /Y

RUN powershell.exe -executionpolicy bypass .\fixAcls.ps1

RUN dockerdeploydemo.deploy.cmd, /Y

So this does nothing more then adding the little PowerShell script to the container and then using that in the step after deploying your website

Hope this helps!

How to Fix Application insights Live Metrics stream on Azure Mobile Apps

28 October 2016 / Marcel / 3 Comments

In preparation for Tech Days 2016, I was working with my colleagues on the Techdays app and for this we also have a backend system. This system is running for some time now and we want to have better insights into the usage of the website and the mobile app.

One of the latest additions to application insights is the capability of Live Metrics, where you can see the current traffic coming into your website or API.

For this you can simply add a NuGet package, which is currently in pre-release, but works great.

Once you install the package and run the website, you will see the Live Stream tile light up in the Azure portal and when you click it you will see a couple of live graphs showing actual traffic on the site or API

Of course we wanted to host our backend very simply on Azure Web apps and for this specific purpose on Azure Mobile Services, Since that is what we use as the mobile backend of the application. But apparently there are some subtle differences that prevent AppInsights to work properly if it comes to Live Metrics.

Using docker on Windows in VSTS build and release management

1 September 2016 / Marcel / 2 Comments

In my previous post I showed you how you can create a docker container image that has an ASP.NET 4.5 website running on the full .NET framework. In this post I want to show you how you can use VSTS build V-next and the release management tools to leverage the docker technology.

Deploying ASP.NET 4.5 to Docker on Windows

1 September 2016 / Marcel / 31 Comments

At the moment of this writing you can search the internet on ASP.NET and docker and all you will find is how to deploy ASP.NET Core applications to a Linux docker container. Although I love the initiative of ASP.NET core, I do believe that ASP.NET 4.5 is something many of you know and love already and nobody talks about how we can leverage docker on windows to run this full version of ASP.NET

To get you started we need to have a Windows version that is capable of natively running docker. With natively running docker I mean that docker is build into the OS. So no use of docker for windows tools, since we don’t want Linux containers, we want to run windows containers! At this moment you can use Windows 10 Anniversary edition and Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 to go through the steps that I describe here to get your ASP.NET 4.5 website running in a docker on windows container.

Execute and publish xUnit Tests results with .NET Core and VSTS

31 July 2016 / Marcel / 12 Comments

At the moment of writing you can not use the standard Visual studio tests task to run your xUnit unit tests on DotNetCore 1.0 and then publish the results to VSTS.

You need some different steps to get DotnetCore compiled and run your unit tests in a VSTS build. Here are the steps to make it work:

Fixing Windows 10 non-responsive start menu

17 March 2016 / Marcel / 0 Comments

I was just doing my work on windows 10 and for no apparent reason the windows 10 start menu would not respond anymore to either my Windows hotkey on the keyboard or by clicking on the start menu icon in the left bottom corner. This meant no response to the windows key and me typing the application I wanted to start, not being able to shut down my machine, etc. So this gave me some real headaches because the only way I could solve this is do a reset of my PC or just repaving my machine and install windows 10 again.

This has happen to me several times and most of the time after I had been doing some Mobile App development where I build mobile apps that are cross platform. Lately I had to do this for my talk at VS Live in Las Vegas and for that I had to turn on developer mode on my windows 10 machine.

Now I am not sure if his issue is caused by the mobile development I have done or if it is just my SSD drive acting up on me and corrupting certain files on my system. I do know that running the following powers shell command (started in administrator mode of course) solved the problem form me:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

1	Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers \| Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

The option DisableDevelopmentMode does the following:

Registers an existing app package (.appx) installation that has been disabled, didn’t register, or has become corrupted. Use DisableDevelopmentMode to specify that the manifest is from an existing installation and not from a collection of files in development mode.

At least this was a way to solve it for me and hopefully it will work for you as well.

Selenium syntax for CodedUI

16 February 2016 / Marcel / 4 Comments

I have been playing around with this idea for quite some time and I already build this for a customer in the past, but after questions I got from people using CodedUI who tried to come up with a simplified syntax I thought it would be time to publish what I have at the moment.

If you hand code your test automation with CodedUI, then you know that searching for a control is always a couple of lines of code to set up a search. You first create an instance of the control you need, provide it the search scope in the constructor and next you need to set the search properties. Once that is done you can then use the control and the moment you use one of it’s properties it will search for your control.

With Selenium this is a bit different. You have the Driver class that provides more or less to primary methods. FindElement and FindElements and you provide it an instance of the By class that contains the search criteria.

Let me illustrate what I mean with two examples. Bot do the same. We goto the google home page and type a search query.

CodedUI:

BrowserWindow b = BrowserWindow.Launch(new Uri("http://google.com"));
HtmlEdit searchBox = new HtmlEdit(b);
searchBox.SearchProperties.Add(HtmlEdit.PropertyNames.Id, "lst-ib");
Keyboard.SendKeys(searchBox, "codedUI Course{Enter}");

BrowserWindow b = BrowserWindow.Launch(new Uri("http://google.com"));

HtmlEdit searchBox = new HtmlEdit(b);

searchBox.SearchProperties.Add(HtmlEdit.PropertyNames.Id, "lst-ib");

Keyboard.SendKeys(searchBox, "codedUI Course{Enter}");

Selenium:

var driver = new ChromeDriver(@"driverfolder");
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://google.com");
var searchBox  = driver.FindElement(By.Id("lst-ib"));
searchBox.SendKeys("codedUI Course{Enter}");

var driver = new ChromeDriver(@"driverfolder");

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://google.com");

var searchBox = driver.FindElement(By.Id("lst-ib"));

searchBox.SendKeys("codedUI Course{Enter}");

In general I hear that people like the Selenium syntax more then the multistep aproach in codedUI. The thing I dislike is that I lose the type safety of the type of control. So the question is, would it be possible to get the same syntax for codedUI and still use codedUI and get a type safe way of interacting with the search controls?

Maintainable Test automation for Winforms using CodedUI

13 February 2016 / Marcel / 20 Comments

This week I got a request on twitter how to work with CodedUI for windows forms and if I had any example. A couple of weeks ago, during a deep dive session we did in Sweden, I got more or less the same question on how can I access my controls when using windows forms, because we are having trouble getting CodedUI to work for us. So therefore I thought it would be a good idea to create a simple sample and describe in a bit more detail how to approach this.

If you have looked at my PluralSight courses or attended one of the training events where I teach CodedUI, you might know that I am trying to convince everyone to never use the CodedUI test recorder, since the way it tries to locate controls and the way it saves the information in the recording file is a nightmare to maintain.

So when investigating how we can locate controls in windows forms in a maintainable way I also avoid the recorder and just use the CodedUI object model to find the controls I need. So let’s first dive into how to find controls and then look at how to write maintainable UI Automation code.

Running XUnit test with ASP.NET DNX and TFS 2015 build

2 August 2015 / Marcel / 14 Comments

Recently I joined a project where they are working on a new application that is based on the new ASP.NET cross platform tooling. While this is still in beta at the moment I write this, we strongly believe in the future of ASP.NET and the ability to run it on multiple platforms. Of course we want this project to start with everything done right from the start, so we are not only writing clean code, we also embrace the continuous delivery concepts and with that we have a strong need of continuous integration and continuous tests. This means we are writing Unit tests from day one and want those integrated in our build system. For the build we use Team Foundation Server 2015 and the new cross platform build system. The challenge I want to discuss today is that the tooling at the moment is still a lot in flux so the unit test tooling for testing cross platform solutions is not fully up to par as you are used to in the “classic” ASP.NET world on just windows.

So when we want to write unit tests, we need to ensure we use a test framework that also supports running on multiple platforms. At the moment XUnit is the test tooling that is already available for DNX. So let me describe the steps involved for making a set of unit tests and run those tests on the new build platform in TFS 2015.