Workaround for unit testing code that reside in the GAC

The problem I expressed my frustration the other day on twitter when it comes to unit testing and code that reside in GAC (global assembly cache). This problem may occur more often in frameworks that like to put their code in the GAC, like SharePoint for example. Let’s examine this with an example: Imagine the […]

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 55,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 20 sold-out performances for that many […]

Introducing the PSBuild meta-runner (for .NET)

I’ve been working on a thing for a while now on my spare time, which hasn’t been all that much I’m sorry to say, that I got an idea for while I was writing the TeamCity meta-runner for semantic versioning, aka “the semver meta-runner”. If you don´t know what a meta-runner is or you’d like to […]

TeamCity: custom agent requirements

While I was working on another blog post I got to thinking about agent requirements. The reason was that I used PSGet to install a PowerShell module (Pester) onto the TeamCity agent server, i.e. I installed it globally. The downside of this approach was that I didn’t have a great story for knowing whether: the […]

Pester: Using TeamCity to run your tests

I’ve previously written blog posts about Pester. The first one was a general purpose overview. The second one was about working with modules and Pester. The whole, original, purpose for me using Pester was to get a bit of quality around a PS module I’ve written called TSR. So the last part of the whole […]

TeamCity Meta-Runner: Semantic Version Build Number

Look at that nice looking SemVer used as a build number in TeamCity. It’s not impossible to get something like that working for you with some script language of choice in a build-runner. However…I just happened to make mine public, as a meta-runner, and others can benefit from it. Note: You can download the meta-runner […]

PowerShell: Write-Verbose and Write-Debug without annoying word wrap

Recently I ran into an issue with the PowerShell runner in TeamCity. I wanted to use the Write-Verbose and Write-Debug cmdlets to conditionally output some messages. However I discovered that the output in the build log was anything but what I originally had planned. The messages where “cut off” or word-wrapped so to say in […]

Creating a TeamCity meta-runner

Starting with TeamCity 8.x you can now “extract” repetitive tasks into build runners, called meta-runners,  that you can re-use without the need for coding a plugin, or as JetBrains themselves like to put it: With a meta-runner, you can easily reuse existing runners, create new runners for typical tasks (e.g. publish to FTP, delete directory, […]

Pester: How to unit test your PowerShell modules

I’ve written about Pester before on how & why you should really start testing your PowerShell code. However, obstacles may arise when you want to write unit tests for PowerShell modules. In this post I’m going to present a solution that enables you to overcome some of these obstacles. Let’s get started. Problem Let’s take the […]

TFS vs. Git…or is it TFS with Git?

Maybe you ended up on this post because you searched for ‘Git vs. TFS’. I hope so. I have seen some debate going on for some time now in twitter about Git versus TFS (here are some examples): If that’s the case I think you’re looking at it from the wrong angle, so to say. […]