JetBrains .NET Tools Blog

When working with TeamCity and Visual Studio, we can do a lot of things right from within our IDE. We can trigger a remote run, fetch dotCover code coverage information from the server, view changes and builds from a tool window, navigate to unit tests and a lot more. In this post, we’ll be looking at some of these features. But first things first: let’s install this nifty tool!

Installing the plugin

Every TeamCity installation ships with several tools for IDE integration (with our IntelliJ IDEA based tools as well as with Visual Studio). We can find the plugin on every TeamCity server under the My Settings & Tools page. We can download the plugin right there!

After downloading and installing the plugin, we can find a new menu item in our Visual Studio.

From this menu, we can connect to our TeamCity server using the Login… menu item. After entering the URL to our TeamCity server and providing the correct credentials, we can start exploring.

Remote run from Visual Studio

When developing a project in Visual Studio, we can initiate a personal build using the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio. We call this a “remote run” because the build that is triggered runs on a TeamCity build agent, not on the developer’s machine. The interesting thing here is that this remote build uses the current version control repository sources plus the changed files in the developer’s IDE. All steps from the build configuration are executed for this personal build as well.

After changing some files locally, we can use the TeamCity | Remote Run (Local Changes) menu to trigger a remote build. In the dialog that opens, we can select the changes we made locally that should be included in this personal build. We can select all changes or cherry-pick just the changes we want to verify on the build server.

Note that we’re using Subversion as the source control system here. Remote Run is available for TFS, Subversion and Perforce. When using Git or Mercurial, the workflow is slightly different. Check the documentation on branch remote run for more information.

When we click the Configure personal build… icon in the toolbar, we have to make some other decisions. First of all, we must select the build configuration we want to use for the personal build. Next, we can provide a comment for this personal build. This comment will be shown in the TeamCity web UI afterwards to describe the personal build.

One interesting option is the Pre-tested Commit checkbox and its related commit if setting. Using this, submitted code changes first go through testing. If all tests pass, TeamCity will automatically commit the changes to version control and integrate it in the next build. When tests fail, the code is not committed and the developer who made the change is notified about this. Here’s a chart of the pre-tested commit workflow.

We can even customize our build: put it at the top of the queue or add additional build parameters.

After clicking the Run button, TeamCity will run the selected build configuration for the included changes. We can see the results in the TeamCity web UI, consult the build log, check unit test results and so on.

My Changes

Since this post is about the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio, we can also verify the status of builds triggered because of our changes by using the TeamCity | My Changes menu.

Build log

From the toolbar, we can consult the build log for every personal build listed in the My Changes window. Clicking the Show Build Log icon (or right-clicking the build and selecting the appropriate context menu) will instruct the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio to download the build log directly from TeamCity.

Open Failed Tests

Did your changes cause a unit test to fail? No worries: we can use the Open Failed Tests context menu from the My Changes window in order to see what is going on. From the window that opens we can re-run the failing tests locally using the ReSharper test runner.

Code Coverage

When you have dotCover installed on your machine, the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio enables us to view code coverage results. Using the TeamCity | Coverage menu item we can select a code coverage snapshot to open.

After selecting and opening a snapshot, we get dotCover’s test runner showing code coverage. We can even double-click a class from the snapshot shown and explore code coverage at the statement level.

Investigate a build

Whenever a build fails, we can volunteer to fix the build by starting an investigation. From the TeamCity | My Investigations menu, we can manage our investigations and take action on open investigations by either fixing it or giving up (when working in developer teams in Belgium, that last option typically results in having to bring pastries for the team).

Open in IDE

The TeamCity web UI features an Open in IDE button on many places. For example, when inspecting changes that were included in a build, we can open the file that was built in our IDE by clicking the IDE icon.

We can open tests in the IDE as well, again using the Open in IDE function. When working with tests, this will trigger Visual Studio to open the ReSharper test runner and display the selected test.

Give the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio a go and let us know what you think!

Did you know that you can run ReSharper Code Inspections on the server using TeamCity? In fact, we added support for this functionality in TeamCity just over a year ago but it seems that the feature is not widely known, specially by ReSharper users.

The setup itself is extremely simple, and we’re going to walk through it, and additionally add some more goodies in the mix.

Activating .NET Inspections in TeamCity

Adding ReSharper inspections to the build process is merely adding the Build Step named Inspections (.NET). The only parameter required is the Visual Studio Solution file

If we do not specify a Custom settings profile path, TeamCity takes the default ReSharper settings for code inspections. However, we can configure these to match our own/teams criteria. This is done via Options | Inspection Severity. We can change a specific setting severity, for instance, that of using String.IsNullOrEmpty

and save the settings to the Team Shared file. This then saves the settings in a file named {Solution}.sln.DotSettings which is normally checked in to source control so that it automatically applies to other team members when the solution is opened in Visual Studio. We can use this same settings file to indicate custom inspection settings for TeamCity

Analyzing results

When the build step runs, TeamCity generates a navigable report for us to analyze inspection results

We can navigate through the inspections for the entire project or a specific namespace. Inspections are grouped by Category, Issue Type and the corresponding files on the right pane. We can even navigate to the actual file by clicking on the line number. For this though, we need to have Visual Studio and the TeamCity plugin for Visual Studio installed (if you do not, clicking on the link will prompt you with a dialog box to download and install the plugin).

The checkbox Inspections with new problems only is used to highlight only new issues since the last build run. The numbers in bracket (+1 –1) are the variance since the last run.

Taking action based on inspection severity

One of the main benefits of adding inspections on the server-side is to put some level of code quality in place, whereby we can have the build process take action based on a series of conditions. For instance, we might like to have a build fail if too many warnings or errors are detected. 

Under Build Failure Conditions in the Project Configuration window, we can add a new Build failure condition:

We select Fail build on metric change and then indicate whether we want a build to fail based on warnings or errors. In our case we’re going to select errors and have it fail if it is more than one.

It should be apparent that if we want inspections to have an impact on the status of our build, that is, have a build fail, we can only do so based on Warnings or Errors. Therefore, Hints and Suggestions cannot be used. As such, when configuring inspections severity in ReSharper, we should take this into account.

If we now run our build again, it should fail as the number of errors are greater than one. Below is the output of the same input and inspections, but one run with the Build failure condition and the other without it.

Checking for copy/paste code

Although strictly speaking, this isn’t related to ReSharper, but since we’re talking about code quality in the build process, it makes sense to also mention that TeamCity can check for code duplication.

Much like before, activating code duplication is simply a matter of adding a new build step, namely Duplicates finder (.NET). We can indicate the folders to ignore, whether we want to take into account namespaces, type names, as well as a few other options.

The output is a nicely formatted navigable screen which allows us to go through the different files and see a side-by-side comparison of what TeamCity has detected as duplication (resized below for space limitations)

And as expected, we can also fail the build if we have too many code duplicates

Summary

It is refreshingly simple to add code quality detection features to the build process and have a build fail if something that shouldn’t be in production code slips through. The next step would be to provide Custom Patterns, which currently are not supported. If you feel this is a feature you’d like, let us know, and as always, any and all feedback is welcome.

This summer we will be visiting two User Groups in Switzerland to talk about some of our tools among other things.

The events are organized in collaboration with the local User Groups of Berne and Lucerne:

If you’d like to attend the event, I’d recommend you sign up as places are limited.

Berne

Date: Tuesday 3rd July – 6 to 9 pm

Topics:

• ReSharper Tips’n’ Tricks
• Real World MVC

Registration, Location and more info: User Group Web Site

Lucerne

Date: Wednesday 4th July - 6 to 8:30 pm

Topics:

• ALM with JetBrains Tools (covering TeamCity, YouTrack et al.)
• Real World MVC

Registration, Location and more info: User Group Web Site

All registrations are handled directly by the user groups. Please contact them (via their web site) if you have any issues.

Hope to see you there!

A few months ago, Scott Hanselman gave a session at TechEd US were he showed some new features we were working on for TeamCity, in order to provide first class support for NuGet. He later blogged about it here.

Instead of delaying until the next release of TeamCity, this feature (like many), has been developed as a plug-in. Eugene, who has been working on it, announced the availability of a first build a few weeks ago. After some initial trials and changes, I decided to setup YouTrackSharp to automate the publishing of the NuGet package. It was surprisingly easy as you’ll see.

1. Installing the Plug-in

If your project is running on TeamCity at Codebetter.com, you can skip to Step 3, since it’s already installed and configured. If not, then grab the latest build from our public TeamCity server. Place the zip file into the plugins folder of your TeamCity installation and restart the server.

2. Configuring the NuGet version

Once the server is running, and agents updated (automated procedure), you then need to tell TeamCity what NuGet version you want to use. The plug-in knows about the nuget.org feed to it can grab the latest version of the command line tool directly. Click on Administration | Server Configuration. If the plug-in installed correctly, you should now have a new Tab called NuGet:

Click on the “Install additional versions of the NuGet.exe Command Line”. TeamCity will read from the feed and display available versions to you in the dialog box. Select the version you want and click Install:

Pull, Pack, Publish

The plug-in offers three main operations:

• Pulling NuGet packages required to build your project
• Creating NuGet packages
• Publishing Packages

In my case, I want to create the package and publish it. To give you a general idea of my build process, here’s the outline of the build steps:

The NuGet related steps are 3 and 4. Step 1 simply builds the project by building the solution file. Step 2 runs the MSpec tests.

3. Building the package

This step is for building the actual package. We create a new Build Step in our project and select NuGet Packages Pack. This will give us the following configuration screen:

As you can see, the configuration is pretty straightforward. Notice that in the Specification file, we can also provide a csproj file as opposed to a NuGet spec file. The advantage to this is that we do not have to redefine information such as version number and copyright information in the spec file. If you’re not familiar with this feature, check out David Ebbo’s post.

I’ve also checked the option to Include Sources and Symbols. This is also explained in David Ebbo’s post and it’s for publishing the sources to Symbolsource. Additional command line parameters (if required) can be passed in the Additional Commandline arguments. If you want to make this a release build, you can also do this by defining Configuration=Release in the Properties field.

Finally I’ve specified the Build number of the package using the TeamCity variable %build.number% which auto increments on each build, and is also used by another feature of TeamCity new in 6.5 which is called the AssemblyPatcher, which I’ll show you as the last step.

4. Publishing the package

The next step is to publish the package. As before, we need to add a Build Step and select NuGet Packages Publish.

This step is even easier to configure. By convention it uses nuget.org as the destination to publish the package. If you have your own NuGet server then fill in the address in the Packages Sources field. If you’re using nuget.org, leave it blank. You need to provide your API key which is stored in a password protected field and finally indicate which packages you want published. Here you can list each package individually or use wildcards. [Note: relative paths are allowed but at the time of writing this post, there was an issue and I was using the full path. This should be fixed soon].

If you want to publish to multiple sources, all you need to do is add another step. Note however that we did not have to specify an extra step to publish the sources to symbolsource.org. TeamCity will follow NuGet’s convention and do this for you automatically.

5. AssemblyInfo Patcher

Although this step is optional I recommend you use it. The AssemblyInfo Patcher is a new Build Feature added to TeamCity which temporarily patches all your projects AssemblyInfo.cs files to update the version number, and then reverts it back after the build is complete. This allows your build number, artifacts, packages and assemblies to all have the same version number. Adding this option is as simple as selecting it from the main project configuration screen:

That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. With a few simple build steps we have now fully automated packaging and publishing NuGet packages. As I mentioned initially, if you’ve got your project on CodeBetter, you already have this feature enabled. If you’re running your own server, just download the plugin and set it up. It’s very simple.

Try it out and please give us your feedback!

On the 5th May, in collaboration with our partners Pluralsight, we will be doing a webcast on Agile environments:

- What exactly is an Agile environment

- Best practices for setting up environments with TeamCity, YouTrack and an OSS stack

This webcast is completely free and open to all. Please check out Pluralsight’s website for more information and registration information.

On Tuesday, 5th April 2011, I’ll be giving a webinar (in Spanish) on how to setup an environment with TeamCity, YouTrack and your favorite OSS tools and frameworks.

Things we’ll see:

• TeamCity: Overview and benefits
• YouTrack: Mouseless Web Issue Tracking
• Introduction to Distributed Version Control Systems and benefits over Centralized
• Creating Continuous Integration Processes with TeamCity and OSS stacks
• Integration with Visual Studio and other IDE’s

The webinar will be roughly 2 hours and it will be mostly demo-centric.

It is a completely free event. If you’d like to attend, please register here

As some of you know, we recently shipped TeamCity 6 which includes, out of the box, a bundled version of dotCover. What this means is that you can now get free coverage for your code easily, and of course even if you’re using the Professional version of TeamCity.  The setup is quite easy if you are using MSTest and NUnit. For MSpec, you need to take a few additional steps.

Using MSTest / NUnit Runners

Normally build files consist of a series of tasks that involve compilation and running of tests. With TeamCity, you can separate some of these steps out into individual TeamCity Build steps, which is what we will be doing in this case (everything that we see here applies to both MSTest and NUnit).

Here is our build.xml (MSBuild) file:

As we can see, other than compiling a solution, which in this case consists of the actual application and the test assemblies, not much else going on.

[Note: this could have been done using the SLN as the Runner Type under TeamCity since this example build script does not do much else. In real scenarios however, build scripts do more than just call a solution (in fact normally you’d call projects not solutions)].

In TeamCity, we create a new build project and setup the VCS root. We then add a new Build Step which calls this MSBuild file:

Notice that all we are doing here is calling our MSBuild script. No coverage settings yet.

Next thing is to add an additional build step in TeamCity. This time, we are going to call MSTest as opposed to MSBuild:

(the sections cut out are blank).

In the .NET Coverage tool section we select JetBrains dotCover and then  add the assemblies we want coverage for (just the name of the assembly) prefixing them with +: and filtering out those we do not want coverage for with –:.

That’s all there is to it. Once we run the Build, we should now see a new tab with Coverage Reports as well as a new Artifact which contains the Coverage files zipped up.

The Code Coverage tab goes into more detail:

We can even drill down into individual classes and examine the code coverage:

If we are using NUnit instead of MSTest, the only difference is there test runner we select when adding a new Build Step in TeamCity. Instead of MSTest we choose NUnit along with the version:

What about MSpec or my Specific Test Runner?

If we are using MSpec or a different test runner that is not supported directly by TeamCity, we can still get coverage reports; we just need to do a little bit of additional configuration. TeamCity has an API which allows us to send it messages when we want to interact with it (this is actually quite a powerful feature but out of scope for this post so please leave a comment if you’d like me to cover it in more detail). We can leverage this API to tell it when to start coverage and where to get the results from.

Here is the build script for MSpec:

We have created two targets. The second one (TeamCity) is the one we are interested in. This does a couple of things:

1. The first <Exec> runs all MSpec tests so that we can see the test results inside TeamCity. This is not strictly necessary for Code Coverage but usually build processes do display these results. The –teamcity option we are passing in to MSpec is for it to generate the system messages that are then fed to TeamCity (see point 3)

2. The second <Exec> is the one that runs dotCover. This uses a configuration file called dotCover.xml which we will examine further down. We pass in the c (or coverage) option when calling dotCover.

3. This is a message we send to TeamCity to tell it that we have run coverage. We indicate the tool we are using (dotcover in this case) and where the results are located. TeamCity uses this information to then display the results in the UI. This is one of the API messages mentioned earlier.

Finally we need to define the dotcover.xml file with out configuration for running dotCover (for detailed information on creating dotCover configuration files, see here and here):

In terms of TeamCity, we then just define our build step that calls out to the build script:

Notice how we do not specify .NET Coverage options explicitly. And if all goes well, we can see the coverage output just as before:

Summary

We can see that running code coverage is now pretty straightforward when using MSTest, NUnit or even a custom test runner. Most of what we have covered for MSpec will work with pretty much any test runner in terms of coverage (feel free to vote here for MSpec support).

With any build process, there are numerous ways of doing the same thing. I’m going to show you one of them. Based on your setup and needs you might want to do things differently. Fortunately TeamCity is flexible enough to allow for many scenarios.

One thing to be aware of is that dotCover creates some temporary files for the XmlSerailizer in the Temp profile folder. This normally is not a problem unless the folder does not exist. If you are running TeamCity under the SYSTEM account, make sure that the folder C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Temp exists. This will probably change in future versions so to avoid any possible issues.

Enjoy!

JetBrains’ renowned continuous integration and build management server, TeamCity, has just reached another milestone with its brand new version 6.

Apart from Gradle and Maven 3 support, multiple build steps, build priorities, new “My Changes” page and other valuable improvements that you can learn more about on the TeamCity blog, there’s a totally cool change that’s highly relevant for .NET developers: dotCover integration.

dotCover is now a first-class TeamCity citizen along with NCover and PartCover and can be used as a code coverage provider. That means, you can run unit test coverage analysis and view coverage reports generated by dotCover right in your continuous integration environment - of course, provided that your continuous integration environment is called TeamCity 6!

In order to analyze code coverage right in Visual Studio, you’ll still need dotCover installed on your dev machine but if you need dotCover reporting in TeamCity, it’s there for you, right out of the box.

Get the fresh, juicy TeamCity 6 from jetbrains.com/teamcity

What do Visual Studio Magazine readers and editors have in common?

They both like JetBrains tools!

As Visual Studio Magazine announced today, JetBrains ReSharper gets this year’s Readers Choice award in General Development Tools and the Editor’s Choice as Most Valuable Developer Tool - both for the second year in a row!

For the second year, JetBrains ReSharper earned top honors as the Most Valuable Developer Tool, dominating both our reader and panelist polling. Panelist and VSM Tools Editor Peter Vogel perhaps said it best: “I think I could write code without ReSharper—but I’m not sure anymore.”

Heavenly music to our ears!

These badges look pretty, don’t they?

That’s not all though!

Two more JetBrains products get Merit awards in their respective categories: dotTrace in Performance, Profiling and Debugging Tools, and TeamCity in Collaboration, Project Management, and Agile Solutions.

Many thanks and hugs to the panelists and readers of Visual Studio Magazine, and to all our users who’re spreading the love around! You’ve got style!

To be honest, we at the dev labs really liked ReSharper 5, too - probably more than any previous version. If ReSharper 6 lives up to expectations and becomes a stunner as we’re designing it to be, we’re hoping for a repeat success next year!

JetBrains tools continue to receive recognition and praise: three of them have been named finalists in this year’s Jolt Awards!

ReSharper, our intelligent add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio that you love so much, was honored as one of the five best Development Environments.

In the Change and Configuration Management category, the finalists included TeamCity, our distributed build management and continuous integration server.

And last but not least, dotTrace, our super-fast and efficient .NET profiling tool, was picked by Jolt judges as one of the best five Utilities.

Best of all, each of these products still has a shot at winning the big kahuna - the Jolt Excellence award, or maybe a Jolt Productivity award! We’ll keep you posted.

We thank you, our customers, for making our products a success.
Keep developing with JetBrains - and with pleasure!