GitVersion vs dotnet pack on VSTS

Last night I run into a problem with GitVersion and dotnet pack command while running my builds on VSTS

The probem came up when I tried to specify a version number I’d like the package to have. There are answers on SO telling me how to do it and I’ve used it in the past. But this time it did not work for some reason, so I had to investigate.

Here is the way it worked for me.
To begin, edit your *.csproj file and make sure your package information is there:

<PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Library</OutputType>
    <PackageId>MyPackageNaem</PackageId>
    <Authors>AuthorName</Authors>
    <Description>Some description</Description>
    <PackageRequireLicenseAcceptance>false</PackageRequireLicenseAcceptance>
    <PackageReleaseNotes>This is a first release</PackageReleaseNotes>
    <Copyright>Copyright 2017 (c) Trailmax. All rights reserved.</Copyright>
    <GenerateAssemblyInfo>false</GenerateAssemblyInfo>
</PropertyGroup>

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PC wakes up at night

Microsoft has a strange idea that anybody would want their PC to be woken up during the night to do the maintenance task. WHY???

All my PCs have encrypted drives and password is required for windows to boot. So even if PC manages to wake itself up – it is stuck on password prompt. DUH!

Way to check it:

powercfg -waketimers

If you see Reason: Windows will execute 'Maintenance Activator' scheduled task that requested waking the computer.

Head to Control Panel -> Security and Maintenance -> Expand Maintenance. There will be an option to disable waking your PC for Maintenance.

And here is another discussion with some answers, though people do report that Windows 10 is notoriously bad for ignoring any/all of these settings and you will still get your PC woken up at night, barring all but unplugging it from the mains

And another discussion with a lot of details.

User impersonation in Asp.Net Core

I’ve blogged about user impersonation in Asp.Net MVC three years ago and this article has been in top 10 of most visited pages in my blog.

Since Asp.Net Core is out and more or less ready for production, it is time to review the article and give guidance how to do the same thing in Core. Approach have not changed at all, we do same steps as before, only some API been changed and it took me a bit of time to figure out all the updated API parts.

Impersonation Process

Impersonation is when an admin user is logged in with the same privileges as a user, but without knowing their password or other credentials. I’ve used this in couple applications and it was invaluable for support cases and debugging user permissions.

The process of impersonation in Asp.Net core is pretty simple – we create cookie for potential user and give this to the current admin user. Also we need to add some information to the cookie that impersonation is happening and give admin a way to go back to their own account without having to log-in again.

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General Rules When Building OSS Libraries

In the last couple years I’ve built a few libraries for public and internal consumption. Mostly these have been internal things, but they are not much different from OSS libraries.

So far the most popular libarary I’ve released open-sourced is Cake.SqlServer but I’m mostly proud of NSaga though it is not as used, mostly due to lack of marketing effort on my part. Both of these are still on v1.x though these are young libraries – both under 1 year of age at the moment of writing.

In a sense libraries for internal consumption are easier to build – you can break things and then fix the broken things in the downstream projects (or tell people how to fix). If your library is publicly released you need to be much more careful in how you handle breaking changes and how you define your public API surface. Semantic versioning is supposed to help you manage the breaking changes, but you still need to minimise the possibilities of breaking things for other people. If you are not careful and break a lot of stuff, people will be pissed off and eventually move away from your library.

While building OSS libraries I had to excersise a lot of care to cater for wider audience and rules I draw below are mostly coming from OSS. So here they are:

.Net Framework Versions

You need to consider what framework version you build for. Nature of .Net framework – every version is an increment on the previous, so library built for v4.5 will work in v4.6.1. But not the other way. So you need to pick the lowest version of .Net you’d like to work with and stick with it. I think it is fare to say that no currently developed project should be below v4.5. There is no reason to stay on lower version and upgrade from v3.5 is relatively painful. So my rule of thumb is to target v4.5 as a baseline, unless I need framework features that are only available in later versions.

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Another reason not to use TFS

TFS source control system has got some strange meaning of “Workspace”. I’ve run into this numerous times and tonight again. This time I’m trying to migrate a project from TFS into git and keep the project name intact. So I’ve renamed my old project in VSTS to be ProjectName.TFS. And created a new one called ProjectName. But was faced with this great error:

The Team Project name ProjectName was previously used and there are still TFVC workspaces referring to this name. Before you can use this name, the owner of each workspace should execute the Get command to update their workspaces. See renaming a team project for more details (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlinkip?Linkld=528893). Found 2 workspace(s) using this name: ws_1_1;b03e2eb0-22aa-1122-b692-30097a2fa824, ws_dd5f57e41;b2345678-98a0-4f29-13692-30097a2fa824

Well, yes. Thanks for letting me know that this project name was used before. And I obviously don’t care about these workspaces – the PC where these were used no longer exist.

Following the link I was advised to execute this command to delete the dead workspaces:

tf workspace /delete [/collection:TeamProjectCollectionUrl] workspacename[;workspaceowner]

Yeah, no problem. Only it took me a while to find tf.exe. It is in the most obvious place in VS2017:

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\

And WTF is TeamProjectCollectionUrl? and what about workspacename[;workspaceowner]? took me a while to figure out the correct format expected. Here what worked for me:

.\tf workspace /delete /collection:mycompanyname.visualstudio.com\DefaultCollection “ws_1_1;b03e2eb0-22aa-1122-b692-30097a2fa824”

The last bit is coming from the error message in VSTS: ws_1_1;b03e2eb0-22aa-1122-b692-30097a2fa824, ws_dd5f57e41;b2345678-98a0-4f29-13692-30097a2fa824 Name from the owner is separated by ; and different namespaces are separated by ,.

All that bloody obvious!

Publish Core XUnit Test Results in VSTS

Following my previous post, I’m building Asp.Net Core web application and I’m running my tests in XUnit. Default VSTS template for Asp.Net Core application runs the tests but it does not publish any results of test execution, so going into Tests results panel can be sad:

And even if you have a task that publishes test results after dotnet test, you will not get far.

As it turns out command dotnet test does not publish any xml files with tests execution results. That was a puzzle for me.

Luckily there were good instructions on XUnit page that explained how to do XUnit with Dotnet Core properly. In *test.csproj file you need to add basically the following stuff:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp1.1</TargetFramework>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="xunit" Version="2.3.0-beta2-build3683" />
    <DotNetCliToolReference Include="dotnet-xunit" Version="2.3.0-beta2-build3683" />
  </ItemGroup>

</Project>

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VSTS Private NuGet Feed and Building Dotnet Core Application

Honestly, VSTS private NuGet feeds will be a most blogged topic in this blog! I’ve already mentioned them at least twice. Here goes another post:

This time I’m building in VSTS Core application and the build literally goes:

  • dotnet restore
  • dotnet build
  • dotnet test
  • dotnet publish

And this worked really well for the basic application – I had it set up in minutes and got the resuilt I was looking for.

But during the life of the application I needed NuGet packages from my private feed and dotnet restore had no idea about my private feeds.

Even if supplied with nuget.config file I was getting 401 Unauthenticated – this is because I was not keeping my password(token) in this file.

Solution was to add this feed globally on the agent for every build. And this turned out to be easier than I thought.

In your build add a new task called Nuget Command:

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Working With Attachments in DocumentDB

I’m building a prototype for a new project and it was decided to use DocumentDB to store our data. There will be very little data and even less relationship between the data, so document database is a good fit. Also there is a chance for us to use DocumentDB in production.

There is a comprehensive documentation about the structure and how it all ties together. Yet not enough coding samples on how to use attachments. And I struggled a bit to come up with the working solution. So I’ll explain it all here for future generations.

Structure

This diagram is from the documentation

And this is correct, but incomplete. Store this for a moment, I’ll come back to this point later.

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My Git Cheat-Sheet

Git can do a lot of things, but I’m lazy remembering all the commands I need – some of them are like 5 words long. So I’ll put this here so next time I don’t have to search for them.

Update list of remote branches:

git remote update origin --prune

Or set automatic pruning globally:

git config --global fetch.prune true    

Delete local and remote branch:

git push origin --delete <branch_name>
git branch -d <branch_name>

Push all branches to remote:

git push --all -u

Push this new branch to remote:

git push origin branchB:branchB

Add annotated tag:

git tag -a v1.4 -m "my version 1.4"

And push tags to remote

git push --follow-tags

To kill all the local changes do

git reset --hard HEAD

To reset to a state of a commit

git reset --hard SHA

To make sure all the extra files are removed do

git clean -f -d

Move local commits into different branch.

Quite often I start hacking and coding while being on master branch and then I commit and then I try to push, but then I get git policies kicking in saying I can only do a Pull Request and push to master. So I need to move committs to a different branch. Here is the way:
1) Create new branch with your changes.

git checkout -b mybranch

2) Push new branch code on remote server.

git push origin mybranch

3) Checkout back to master branch.

git checkout master

4) Reset master branch code with remote server and remove local commit.

git reset --hard origin/master

Stolen from this answer