Category Archives: Software Development

Don’t believe NUnit

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Just a quick note about a little problem I found using Nunit (2.2.9, but affects earlier revisions too).

After a bunch of edits to my project, I suddenly started getting messages from NUnit GUI “could not load file or assembly nunit.core”. Try as I could, this would not go away. This included everything from reinstalling NUnit to tracking DLL loading via SysInternal’s Process Explorer tool.
My project is non trivial – a top level solution containing an ASP2 web project, a couple of library DLL’s for the business logic, a unit test executable, and a testing helper library to help cross reference test results against direct SQL calls. As I’ll be writing about in another post shortly, incorporating unit testing into an ASP project is a pain in the rear and so I had been restructuring things. My natural assumption based on the error message was I had messed up something in the linking/referencing.

But it turned out to be an error in the application config file – for some reason NUnit reports this as a DLL missing, not that you have mistyped a bit of config text. I simply had a closing tag in the wrong place – still syntactically correct, however.
This link is by someone else who hit the exact same problem, and he has written about in more detail.

So remember folks: never assume a system generates the correct error message for all circumstances.

Perforce server logging problem

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When setting up a server it is often useful to enable one of the logging levels. The admin guide states that you need to do this:

  • p4 set P4DEBUG=server=2


which sets the server logging level to 2. You then need to restart the Perforce server.

However, if Perforce is running as a service (the default under Windows), then this does not work. The reason is that “p4 set” only sets the variable in for HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the Windows registry. However, when running as a service, p4d picks up its environment variables from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. To do this you need to set the ‘-s’ flag. E.g.

  • p4 set -s P4DEBUG=server=2

Adding ASP Role tables to your own database

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This is still work in progress, but I want to incorporate the user role management tables within my own database, as the concept of users and their distinct roles ties right in with the core business model of the new site.
The following link explains the standalone tool to create the tables:
ASP.NET SQL Server Registration Tool

Invoking the exe runs a wizard requesting the database service – it needs to match the connection string as mentioned in the gotcha above. Since no parameters are specified, it then creates a database “aspnetdb” with all the role tables. This is not quite what I want, as I need these added to my application database.

The answer is to use the command line:
aspnet_regsql -S -E -A all -d

If you run SQL Management Server Studio Express before and after – not forgetting to hit ‘refresh’ – then a bunch of new tables are added: aspnet_Applications, aspnet_Roles, aspnet_SchemaVersions, aspnet_Users, aspnet_UsersInRoles etc. Now it is just a matter of hooking those up with the application tables.

Since I wanted membership and roles as well as basic authentication I used the “-A all” option to add everything in. Of course I get profile and web-part support too with this, but I may choose to exploit such features in the future.

Gotcha on setting up a data connection

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This one gets me every time. When you set up a new data connection to a database running on a local copy of Sql Server Express, in the “Add Connection” dialog you need to prefix your machine name to the defaulted value of “SQLEXPRESS”. E.g. if the network name of your PC is called “devpc”, then the connection string is:

  • DEVPC\SQLEXPRESS

While this is the obvious choice and works for many circumstances, a subtle variation is to use the following instead:

  • localhost\SQLEXPRESS

This now points the connection to an instance of SQL Server Express running on your local machine. If working in a team where each developer needs their own local copy of a database, then setting this in the web.config file can be a real help.