Coverage reports in C# with Cobertura

In the last contract I completed, we were building WebAPI microservices in C#, and part of our build process was to run all of our XUnit (and, depending on who originally wrote the microservice, maybe NUnit) tests and use SonarCloud to produce a pretty amazingly specific coverage report that highlighted every source file's test status, line-by-line.

I've got a personal project in C#, have been spending time recently writing tests for it, and wondered if I could pull off the same level of coverage testing.

Turns out I can! Exactly the same!

Install by adding a ref to the coverlet collector to your testing proj:

dotnet add package coverlet.collector

Then run the test with this:

dotnet test --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage"

After the above command is run, a coverage.cobertura.xml file containing the results will be published to the TestResults directory as an attachment.

And sure enough, there's a new folder with every run in my C:\path\to\app\MyTestingProjectFolder\TestResults folder. The cobertura file is in painfully named folders like 946f0f00-2eec-4cef-b734-e683d4e258aa, but open the latest and you can see the XML.

Now the XML isn't very interesting.

<coverage line-rate="0.4882" branch-rate="0.465" version="1.9" timestamp="1745620667" lines-covered="1101" lines-valid="2255" branches-covered="299" branches-valid="643">
    <sources>
        <source>C:\path\to\app\MyApp\</source>
    </sources>
    <packages>
        <package name="MyAppPackage" line-rate="0.4882" branch-rate="0.465" complexity="734">
    <classes>
        <class name="Program" filename="Program.cs" line-rate="0" branch-rate="1" complexity="2">
    <methods>
        <method name="<Main>$" signature="(System.String[])" line-rate="0" branch-rate="1" complexity="1">
            <lines>
                <line number="16" hits="0" branch="False"/>
                <line number="20" hits="0" branch="False"/>
            </lines>
    </method>
<!-- ... -->

You have to turn that into a more interesting report.

This Stackoverflow answer explains how:

This tool quickly generate Html reports from coverage file. Works quite well and does not require complex activities, can be easily included in the build process.

From the README:

Install:

dotnet tool install -g dotnet-reportgenerator-globaltool

Run:

reportgenerator [options]

which, in my case, if I'm already in the same folder as the coverage.cobertura.xml file, looks like this:

reportgenerator -reports:".\coverage.cobertura.xml" -targetdir:"coveragereport" -reporttypes:Html

... which, because we said so in the options, creates a folder named coveragereport in the same dir, and within that are two html files that are identical except for their file extensions, index.htm and index.html. Far be it for a Microsoft-adjacent tool to stop producing three-letter file extensions.

And then that report looks incredible:

I have no idea why I redacted so much of that. Also note this is running against a very early stage piece of code. This coverage is obviously horrendous. But the coverage report isn't!

Labels: testing, windows

I've talked about how great it is to have a store in my pocket for 15 years. And I've often lamented how this -- the ubiquitous store -- seems to be the end game of the digital age.

Remember when Windows tested advertisements in Windows Explorer? Well, here's Microsoft's user friendly (?) alternative that did get released: Begging you not to leave Edge for Chrome with Edge playing the part of a jilted lover.

No, not joking. Edge even tells you (no, literally it does!) that it loves you to make you stay.

From The Verge

:

Labels: advertising, edge, hats o' money, windows

Have a ThinkPad E490s. It's nice. Upgraded the RAM immediately. Upgraded the SSD this past weekend from 256 gigs to 1 TB.

Bad news after restoring my laptop's image: There was this weird recovery partition sitting between my old files and my free space and Disk Management wouldn't let me remove it. I was stuck, it appeared, with a D: drive, which, in my limited experience, is never a good thing to have on the same physical drive as C:. It sounds like it shouldn't be bad news, and might even be a good way to separate concerns, but I've never caught myself thinking, "Gosh, I'm glad I did that," and have, on several occasions, though, "WHY IS IT EASIER IF I KEEP EVERYTHING ON THE C:\ DRIVE? WHY DOES THAT STILL MATTER IN THE 21st CENTURY?!!?1!/!!!?"

Anyhow, cut to the chase: You can delete the Recovery drive from your disk, and do it without fear if you have an imaged backup and a USB recovery/startup drive already in your possession like I did before removing the old drive.

Here are some instructions.

TL;DR -- diskpart, list disk, select disk, list partition, select partition n, delete partition override.

You can now expand C: into that extra space.

Labels: hardware, lenovo, noteToSelf, ssd, upgrade, windows

From pcgamer.com on the ad in Windows Explorer:

Update: In a statement to The Verge, senior Windows program manager Brandon LeBlanc said "This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off.” So it looks like the addition of ads at this point was unintentional.

You don't need to read more to know the key phrase here is "at this point".

I've complained a bit that the store is taking over Windows and iOS, heck, even Firefox:

From techcrunch.com late last year:

What’s maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla’s new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off.  As Mozilla executive VP Angela Plohman and CFO Eric Muhlheim noted in today’s announcement, revenue from new product offerings will grow 150% this year and account for 14% of the organization’s revenue in 2021. The Mozilla VPN service saw a revenue increase of 450% from 2020 to 2021.

Windows shows me advertisements for Edge, and Edge tries to tell me that there are better deals on what I'm trying to buy on Amazon. It's a slippery slope.

Anyone who thinks that this ad from Windows Explorer was a "mistake" is fooling themselves.

But in the same vein as my, "Someday, we'll be more worried when everyone can't see our location all the time" argument, it's not like ads are inherently evil. It's just that the ones that fill the internet now stink out loud. That is, if you sold me something I wanted with amazing accuracy and kept the info about me on my box, I'd probably be impressed.

There are useful ways to present ads. Asking if you want to autowrite your way to success is not one of them.

Labels: advertising, hats o' money, windows

You're doing this at your own risk. If you think you might want to vet each step, you should. 

Worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

1. Download exiftool, an open-source, Perl [sic]-powered tool
• I'll recommend the installer here.
2. Install the exe somewhere and get its location
3. Create a .bat file with this content (hat tip):
• for %%v in (*.%1) do c:\path\to\exiftool.exe -all= "%%v"
• If you want it to recursively spider down folders, use this:
• for /r %%v in (*.%1) do c:\path\to\exiftool.exe -all= "%%v"
4. Call the .bat file in the folder where you have the images
• C:\path\to\myBat.bat jpg
• Note that this does one extension at a time but you can enter * instead to do every file (including non images) in the directory
• C:\path\to\myBat.bat *
• You could also rewrite that bat command to look for common file extensions.
5. Profit.

Labels: command-line, images, noteToSelf, windows

From microsoft.com:

If an update you are being offered is causing system crashes or instability and Windows was operating correctly prior to that change, you can follow these instructions to prevent the unwanted driver or update from being installed:

1. Type “View Installed Updates” in the Search box and then click on View Installed Updates – Control Panel from the Search results.
2. To uninstall the unwanted update, select it from the list and then click Uninstall.

To temporarily prevent the update from being reinstalled until an updated fix is available, a troubleshooter is available that provides a user interface for hiding and showing Windows Updates and drivers for Windows 10. You can obtain and run the "Show or hide updates" troubleshooter by downloading it from the Microsoft Download Center:

Download the "Show or hide updates" troubleshooter package now.

Just hid the April update that's apparently causing trouble, but then couldn't find much confirmation of that and unhid it.

Still, interesting to learn that that utility is there.

Labels: windows

If, for example, you knew that the file had bob somewhere in the file, you would type:

dir *bob*.* /s

Labels: cmd, fail, noteToSelf, windows

Something tells me this wasn't an official use case.

I guess I'm missing the real story here -- somebody thought to ensure "negative" time values are reported with the word "ago" appended to them.

Labels: fail, testing, windows

If there's one often-overlooked feature in Windows that I really enjoy using, it's the "Cascade all windows" feature for the taskbar.

I've been told -- unprovoked, so you know it's bad -- that I tend to have a lot of windows open when I'm working. It's true. I do. And when it's time to clean them all up, it's nice not to have to declare "windows management bankruptcy" and close everything I have open in an app before closing it out.

To dodge this, you can hold down shift as you right-click a taskbar icon, and select the option from this menu:

Well, often you can do this and quickly go through whatever the app has open. What Chrome does is less than particularly helpful.

It's hard to see there, but you can't read any window titles other than the very first one. You can click the image to make it full-sized. What's displayed sort of gives you an idea of how much you're going to have to sift though, but it's otherwise not insanely helpful.

Here it is, up close.

I can tell my order has shipped in the front window, and how many tabs I have open in the other five, but that's it. Done.

Look at what Edge does.

It's a little hard to see the details in the picture, but you can get a feeling of how absolutely beautiful (and by "beautiful", like any good engineer, I mean "practical" and "useful") that is. I can see every window, every tab, every title. Now I can quickly hit the X at the top right to close any window I'm done using & that needs to go away.

Here's what Edge shows when "cascaded", zoomed in.

Being a good resident

Edge gets Windows. You might say you're not surprised, but what is surprising is how badly Chrome flubs it. I mean, I understand the, "They even use Material Design on iOS, man!" argument, but I'm not buying that doing so requires that you be a bad Windows resident.

Edge looks distinctly different from Internet Explorer, for instance. You've got plenty of leeway before you lose your design language, so to speak. And even though Apple, for instance, completely ignored all the good Windows resident requests with iTunes and WinSafari, two wrongs don't make a right.

In short, it's not that hard to push the titles up into all of that dead white space in Chrome.

Why not use that for displaying real information, even if there wasn't the option to cascade windows? And since there is, well, let's just say that it's a horribly efficient, beautiful thing when the title bar/browser tabs are done right.

Labels: chrome, coding, design, edge, fail, style, windows

From microsoft.com:

You can select which level of diagnostic and usage data to provide, but some diagnostic data is vital to the operation of Windows and cannot be turned off. Full is the recommended setting because it gives you the same benefits of Basic and Enhanced, plus all the most effective troubleshooting of Enhanced and Full.
...

• Full includes everything in Basic and Enhanced levels, plus additional diagnostic data including the memory state of your device when a system or app crash occurs (which may unintentionally include parts of a document you were using when a problem occurred). It also turns on advanced diagnostic features that can collect additional data from your device, which helps us further troubleshoot and fix problems. When we learn that devices are experiencing problems that we have trouble diagnosing or replicating internally, we will randomly select a small number of devices from those at the Full level that are experiencing those problems from which to gather the data needed to diagnose and fix the problem (including user content that may have triggered the issue). If an error report contains personal data, we won't use that information to identify, contact, or target advertising to you. Full is the recommended option for the best Windows experience and the most effective troubleshooting.

[emphasis mine -- mfn]

I don't know. That sounds like too much to me.

And "unintentionally"? No, that's completely intentional. It's Windows' intention to send back everything that's in your RAM, and that could be gigs of information, couldn't it?

And boy, a little pushy on what's their "recommended" setting, even though there's very little in there that explains why it should be mine.

To, um, "fix" in Windows 10, hit the Windows key, type in "feedback", and then select the "Feedback privacy settings" option.

Then select "Basic" in the "Diagnostic and usage data" section.

I don't think there's an option for less info than "Basic". I also don't remember being asked this when I set up this box, and I'm pretty sure I did the "custom"/manual setup. /shrug

Labels: privacy, windows

I like John Gruber a lot, but his reactions to the new MacBook Pro have been wildly off the mark.

When Tim says "P-C" you say, "Now also inclu-udes MacBooks"!

From Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple Lingo to English of Tim Cook's Year-Ago 'Why Would You Buy a PC Anymore?' Comment:

People are pointing to this as proof that Tim Cook doesn’t care about the Mac, because he thinks everybody should just switch to an iPad Pro. But here’s the thing, in Apple lingo, the Mac is not a “PC”. A “PC” is a personal computer that runs Windows or Linux or whatever. I’m not splitting hairs here — this is how people inside Apple talk. It’s right there in the opening lines of the years-long “Get a Mac” ad campaign (66 ads!) — “I’m a Mac…”, “… and I’m a PC.”

No, Gruber's just plain wrong. I thought I remembered Cook using "PC" to mean Mac and WinPC, and, after a little Googling, found I was right:

@gruber Cook *has* said PC to mean Mac. https://t.co/bq0eG0eIjj pic.twitter.com/3vYWU6bx7f

— Ruffin (@r_ffin) November 1, 2016

Here it is in context (this is a transcript of Cook talking to Goldman Sachs):

If we had a meeting today in this hotel and we invited everybody that’s working on the coolest PC apps to come to the meeting–you might not find anybody in the meeting! But if you did that same thing for iOS or that other operating system, and said everybody that’s working on this come, you couldn’t get everybody in [this?] hotel. You’d have somebody covering every square inch here. That’s where the innovation [is;?] here. That doesn’t mean the PC is going to die; I love the Mac! And the Mac is still growing, and I think it can still grow.

Sorry, man. Tim Cook uses "PC" to mean "anyone's PC".

I know Jobs didn't. Cook always has. Used to sound incongruous when he did it, but now that Windows is sort of a lesser beast, it makes some sense to stop with the Mac/PC dichotomy. Macs sell like mad [in the limited market which is Cook's PC]. Macs & other PCs makers are equals at worst. Calling them all PC manufacturers allows Apple to be one of the best of the breed.

Slow your horses, DF

Anyhow, just plain wrong on this one. What worries me is that we're skirting fanboy territory in Daring Fireball recently. Gruber is usually pretty measured in his comments about Apple. Don't get me wrong; his aesthetic so closely parallels Apple's that you do have to wonder how much is "his" and how much has been internalized from watching Apple so closely all these years. But wherever the aesthetic comes from (and I think it's predominantly his own), I think John does a great job letting Apple know when they've missed their own mark, so to speak. That's what keeps you from becoming a fanboy.

But here, well, there's a segment of traditional Mac users that weren't served by the light at the end of the MacBook Pro upgrade tunnel. After waiting years to buy a new Mac, we get overpriced, underpowered, underspecced boxes. I tried to explain why we're disappointed, using expectations set by Steve Jobs. These aren't the trucks we were looking for.

And it's not because the only way to deliver was to make ugly boxes. That is, "nice" vs "well spec'd" isn't a zero sum game, which is nearly what Gruber argued yesterday when stumbling over a comparison of MBPs to System76 Linux laptops:

(I will add that the Oryx is ugly as sin, and doesn’t have a retina-resolution display. Here I am slamming it.)

But the price you pay for the MacBook Pro isn’t about the sum of the components. It’s about getting them into that sleek, lightweight form factor, too. In a word, Apple is optimizing the MacBook lineup for niceness. That’s frustrating — in some cases, downright angering — for people who want a notebook optimized for performance.

Perfect rebuttal? Look to this post, quoted on Michael Tsai's excellent roundup, New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac:*

David Owens II:

To me, Thursday’s event signaled one thing for me, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but the Mac is officially over.

[…]

Apple, the MacBook Pro is not a pro-level computer. It’s simply not.

You want to see what a pro-level laptop looks like? Look at the Razer lineup. They are crushing it on terms of performance and style in hardware design.

You can shoot down System76 for making chunky Linux boxes. You can't say this about Razer. Small, "nice", fast, and fairly well priced. Maybe my Lenovo truck is ugly (it largely is), but the Razer isn't.

And, as David Owens rightly says, the MBP "is not a pro-level computer". The MBP isn't a "Pro" computer to the point that Schiller himself during the laptop roll-out suggested that the "professional" but entry level MBP was a replacement for the consumer MacBook Air. As I emailed Gruber this morning, "When you slot a MBP into the consumer half of the product grid, we've got a problem [with meeting past expectations, at least]." ^{(Note: I just added "meeting".)}

* Speaking of Tsai's roundup, it also included my earlier post -- wow. Lots of clicks from Tsai, but then another HUGE bump once Daring Fireball linked to him. So 4x Tsai clicks just from being grand-fireballed!

Labels: apple, cook, gruber, hardware, linux, macbook pro, windows

I'm close to releasing my second application to the Windows App Store, and have gotten just good enough at dealing with icons -- not a rocket scientist-level task by any stretch -- and thought I'd share.

Buy an icon

First, you need a square png (or other common format) of your icon that's at least 620x620 pixels. You can get a nice rounded image, but for the Windows Store, at least, a full square is better.

In my experience, it's not too difficult to trade a couple weeks of waiting (in case you get a bad contractor) and $5-$15 to get a servicable icon from fiverr.com. I've used folks from Pakistan each time, strangely enough, and gotten very good results three times, most recently with foxsquare. You do need to be respectful to some degree, as their contract says, "We Do NOT Take Order related to Pork, Nudity, Alcohol & Gambling." So far, so good for me.

Here's my latest, a design for a podcast feed creator. I wish the angles on the orange circles were perfectly symmetrical, and that the little "i" icon didn't reach the bottom of the image, but all things considered, this is a heck of a lot better than I could've done in several hours' work. It's a steal at $15 with .psd.

package.appmanifest

To insert the icon into your UWP app, open up your package.appmanifest file from Solution Explorer, and hit the Visual Assets tab.

Now you have a pretty simple interface to upload icon imagery. I recommend clicking on each of the lines from "Square 71x71 Logo" on down.

Resizing your original

For each one, you'll want to upload resized versions of your original icon. "But how do I get those resized images quickly?" you ask? That's easy if you download IrfanView, the handiest image viewer I've ever used.

Can't recall how many years I've used IrfanView now, and I was impressed to learn that it has extensive command line support.

First name the original square.png. Then run a bat file that resizes everything.

Here's the bat file I'm running, though you may have to change to the path where you have IrfanView installed:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(284,284) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\284.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(600,600) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\600.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(300,300) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\300.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(620,620) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\620.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(176,176) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\176.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(200,200) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\200.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(96,96) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\96.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(88,88) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\88.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(50,50) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\50.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(24,24) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\24.png

pause

Boom. Done.

Now go into the appmanifest UI and click on every largest size available for each asset line, then add your image.

NOTE: Some of these already have placeholder X images in your project. OVERWRITE THEM. You can overwrite in addition to the ones you're uploading to ensure you have decently high quality images.

Rectangle splash and wide logos

This will leave you with just two assets unfilled, both rectangular. One is the "Wide 310x150" and the other the "Splash Screen" logo.

I kinda cop out here. I could probably get fiverr to make me some, but instead I open Ms. Paint.

The size we need is 1240x600. I tell Paint to create a new image, then I hit "resize" (Ctrl-W, strangely enough), and get it to 1240x600.

Make sure "Maintain aspect ratio" isn't checked.

Then I use the paint bucket to fill that all black. Finally, I paste in the 600x600 image IrfanView created and slowly move the middle pixel over until it's at 620 pixels into the image in Paint. Very high tech.

Save it and put into both of the assets you had left.

Voila! The end. Cheap and quick.

Labels: fiverr, howto, images, paint, uwp, windows, windows store

Tried to update an app from the Windows App store.

So that was useful.

Labels: design, fail, windows

Hello, kudos to Windows. Groove Player is playing FLAC format out of the box, as advertised, apparently.

I'm not an audio snob, but I sure do enjoy downloading free and legal shows from etree. They're usually in FLAC format now (no more shn, I don't think), and not having to convert them is wonderful. And it's nice not having to load a new codec to get things to play like I did on macOS for so long (thank you for years of use, Perian).

I've gotten to the point that I enjoy using the Windows Groove player okay. It's so much more straightforward than iTunes now, and its Metro style/UWP GUI is a huge improvement over Windows Media Player. Lighter-weight, less resource hogging software is good, though I'm afraid it's going to keep creeping up as they try to sell more and more stuff (lots of streaming stuff in "Your Groove" now). FLAC support just adds to the enjoyment.

Labels: flac, iTunes, music, windows

Labels: fail, win10, windows

When arranging two windows side-by-side, we noticed in practice that this scenario frequently involved snapping the first window and then spending time wading through other windows on screen to find the second one to drag and snap. This insight lead us to ask: instead of making you hunt for the second window to snap, why not present a list of recently used windows up front? This is the fundamental idea behind Snap Assist in Windows 10.

Labels: noteToSelf, win10, windows

From here:

SOLUTION: in Windows 7 [and 8, as it turns out -mfn], press and hold Shift and right click on the grouped icon that you want to open all of it's grouped windows in a cascade arrangement, then click on Cascade . All the windows of this particular program will open in cascade exactly as in XP.

Wow. Yes please. I used to use the right-click shortcut to cascade all the windows, but didn't realize you could do it one application at a time, I don't think. I often leave open too many browser windows, and it's nice to bring them all to the front where they're easily eyeballed before shutting them out.

Labels: noteToSelf, windows

Labels: fail, windows

It's time to upgrade to an even better Skype experience on your Windows 8 device. Your current version of Skype is being replaced by an app called Skype for Windows desktop. It has more features to help you stay in touch like screen sharing and group video calling. Also, your chat conversations (from the last 30 days) and all your contacts will appear as normal after upgrading.

Labels: email, mbox, win10, win8, windows, xml

I inherited some code as part of a Rube Goldbergian file-to-db process, and it has a step that uses JavaScript on Windows to parse csv files. Instructions said to use WScript to run it [sic]. Boy, that was fun. When I decided to push all the debugging into a central function that also output the info to WScript.Echo, each call to Echo would be output to a message box, which is insanely annoying.

Quick SO answer to the rescue. Quick sum: Run the script with cscript and everything goes to the console instead. That is, WScript assumes running in a Windows app context, and cscript assumes a console.

Side note: You can't use CScript.Echo in place of WScript.Echo, however. WScript is used regardless of the context you use to run the script. So don't try and get clever, kk?

Labels: javascript, noteToSelf, windows