Fiberglass flowers

A friend asked me, so I conclude someone might need a jumpstart on unit tests.

Here’s a short list of short (though very deep, if not best) intros.

• Except for JUnit cookbook (~2 pages) (which has a lot of “ports”, like CppUnit cookbook), I’d name:
• “Endo-Testing: Unit Testing with Mock Objects” at mockobjects.com (Tim Mackinnon, Steve Freeman, Philip Craig) (7 pages);
• “Mocks aren’t stubs” by Martin Fowler (about 7 pages);

For deeper dive, take a “xUnit patterns” book (this one is longer).

For Kent Beck’s book on TDD, shame on me - I never read it. Though after “XP explained” I don’t strive for reading his books.

// If you’re interested in XP and “XP explained” criticism, take a look at “Extreme Programming Considered Harmful for Reliable Software Development” by Gerald Keefer.

Lua recently became very popular. I encountered Lua scripting in several applications including popular games, I believe it’s used in even more then Wikipedia says.

It’s extremely simple:

• 6 data types (that’s counting “nul” and “function”),
• no C++-style OOP out-of-box (but you can program one, he-he),
• 400K of pure-C code

but is loaded with in-fashion features like

• first-class functions,
• closures,
• coroutines…
• again, Wikipedia is the best.

The only metaprogramming tutorial (with a ready code to implement virtual methods) is “Programming in Lua” book. Still, I don’t see a code to implement ad-hoc polymorphism… Maybe it’s a reason for another post

Redistributed book removed: it violated copyright.

One of my friends once encountered a C++ compilation issue.
A program is given:

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
using namespace std;

#define SFORMAT(e) ((dynamic_cast<const ostringstream&>(ostringstream() << e)).str())

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
cout << SFORMAT(“2 x “ << ” 2 = “ << 2*2);
return 0;
}

No one asks you what it will print, unless you’re a god.

Question is: why is the first const char* printed as a pointer, instead of what we need?
Two years ago, I couldn’t tell.
Some guru from Apple answered this in a newsgroup.

Here, take another, simpler C++ quiz about member pointers.

A couple of notes how NOT to use MSBuild.

1. Don’t generate files with AssemblyInfo task. It screws comments, screws InternalsVisibleTo attributes, and whatever else it doesn’t account for.
   Instead: Use
   <FileUpdate Files="@(AssemblyInfoFiles)"
Regex="AssemblyVersion\(".*?"\)\]"
ReplacementText="AssemblyVersion("$(Major).$(Minor).$(Build).$(Revision)")]"
/>
<FileUpdate Files="@(AssemblyInfoFiles)"
Regex="AssemblyFileVersion\(".*?"\)\]"
ReplacementText="AssemblyFileVersion("$(Major).$(Minor).$(Build).$(Revision)")]"
/>
2. Don’t account for TfsXXXX community tasks - it won’t run on VS 2008 with Team Explorer 9.0.
   Instead:  Use <Exec Command=”tf …”>.
   And if you have domain authentication in TFS and don’t run integration under domain user (which happens), you even can’t run tf in cmd-line mode: stupid authentication dialog will pop up.
3. Do not use local files to store version number. You will lose them when moving build to another host, so use only source control-dependent files.
   Might seem evident, but strange how many people miss this.
   So you’ll need to
   <Attrib Files="version.txt" Normal="true" />
4. Per Scott Colestock’s post, “since TfsVersion interrogates the build server’s workspace, and BuildNumberOverrideTarget comes early in the process… you might find that you don’t get the changeset number you expect”.
5. Don’t try to operate on XML node collections with tasks other then Xslt.
   For instance, XmlRead returns a Nodeset only as a string of “;”-joined
   Node.Value-s.
   XmlQuery supports Values property, though I wasn’t able to operate it’s results.
   Instead you can use ReadLinesFromFile (sadly, this will trim the lines).
   My personal choice for not-too-complex XML is… you can guess… yes, FileUpdate.
6. Don’t use FtpUpload. It won’t create folders for you.
   Just <Exec> a ftp…
   By the way, Windows’ ftp.exe client is unable to upload in passive mode. You can download passively, if you issue “LITERAL PASV“, but it won’t help the client.

Now I know it.

It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post.

Why? Implementation limitations, I believe. No sane reasons for such a contract, no article mentioned this. Surely, who’s going to declare own “features” of that kind - just a gentle hints that “you should better use bootstrapper”. Another reason to long for a systems where setup is just a copy.

So go pack a MSI, then make a MSBuild bootstrapper.

Oh wait, do I have to have 2 files in my installation? And my customers can’t download one file?

Yes. Or go for WinZip Self-Extractor, or WinRar, or whatever else.

What about build scripts? For WinRar, here’s a nice sample. For WinZip sfx, there’s also a command-line interface. Do a

wzipse32 %ARC_NAME% -setup -auto -runasuser -le -i ../icon.ico -wait msiexec -c ".\setup.exe"

WinZip will do the thing, though displaying some dialogs we don’t need at all.

Oh, WinRar won’t work, because it erases temporary files upon setup.exe completion. And we need to wait for msiexec, because setup.exe exits earlier. What a pity.

Did you ever try parsing C++? What about parsing for every combination of possible define-s at once?

Microsoft has a static code checker tools for C++, like FxCop for .NET.

That’s awfully complex task, you now see. In .NET you can analyze bytecode, and luckily don’t really need to account for conditional compilation. In C++ where everthing is about #ifdef - it’s hell.

I never heared of anything like that. Though Insure++ or AQTime do way more things when profiling runtime, they of course find only things that were on necessary execution paths.