Learning IOS Development the Doer way

Klaus Graefensteiner — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:27:56 -1500

Learning IOS has a challenging learning curve, but luckily there all kinds of resources that will make the climb to the summit joyous. This blog post is my favorite collection of these resources.

Figure 1: Getting things moving

Go shopping

Go to the Apple Store and buy an iMac, an iPhone and an iPad.
Sign up for the Apple IOS Developer program
Sign up for a Micro plan at Github
Download CS193P videos, slides, assignment and sample source from ITunes U
Go to RayWenderlich.com and purchase the iOS Apprentice tutorial series
Buy Photoshop CS5
Buy the Tapworthy book

For game development

For Game Development purchase the Ray Wenderlich’s Space Game Starter Kit
Buy the Cocos 2D book

Free reading

To get more read the following Apple Developer Guides

Interesting iOS frameworks

These frameworks are covered by the ITunes U iOS lectures.

Accessibility
Core Data
Core Location
Acceleration and Gyroscope
Camera, sound recorder and media library
Contacts
Notification Services
iCloud
Game Center

Interesting iOS apps to dissect

WordPress IOS app

Interesting 3rd party libraries

OpenCV for IOS
Barcode scanning
2D Physics Engine
2D Graphics
SOAP Client (more)
NeuroSky ThinkGear SDK
Bump API
OData
Redpark Serial Cable SDK. A kit for the Arduino can be bought from the MakerShed.
REST client with JSON serializer
Mogenerator Core Data code generator
Flot JQuery plotting plugin

Make it look and sound pretty

Hook up with some Business Intelligence services

Telemetry with Flurry
Game Analytics with Playtomic

Ausblick

There you go. Have a blast with IPhone app development!

NUnit Test Start and End Time Logging Add-in

Klaus Graefensteiner — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:37:23 -1500

Introduction

One of the shortcomings of the test results reporting of NUnit is the absence an absolute start and end time timestamp for each individual test execution. That makes it especially difficult to correlate failing tests with events in the test infrastructure.

Figure 1: NUnit test results with start and end time timestamp for each individual test

Luckily there is an easy way to hook into the NUnit test runner events using a custom Event Listener Addin. This blog post provides the Visual Studio 2010 project and some additional information about my NUnitTestLogger Addin.

Reference links

Some information about the NUnit Event Listener hooks that I used for this Addin can be found in the NUnit documentation. A more detailed overview is provided by a blog post that describes the capabilities of the NUnit Addin framework.

File format

I decided to write the additional test timestamp information into CSV files. Each test assembly would get its own file using the following file name format:

[Test assembly build version]_[Test assembly name]_[Test start time]_[Test computer name]_[Number of tests in test assembly].csv

The following example file name shows the application of this format definition:

0.1.0.28281_BlogShellTx.UnitTests.dll_20110819234257_LABSTATUS_24.csv

Figure 2: CSV file name format

Addin implementation

The following screenshot shows the kind of information the NUnit Event Listener provides.

Figure 3: Event Listener hooks capabilities

Implementing the hooks is fairly easy. The following two cs files demonstrate how I did it :

TestRecord.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;

namespace NUnitTestLogger
{
    class TestRecord
    {
        public string FullName { get; set; }
        public int ResultState { get; set; }
        public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }
        public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }
        public string AssemblyName { get; set; }
        public string ComputerName { get; set; }
        public string BuildVersionNumber { get; set; }
        public DateTime RunDateTime { get; set; }
        public int Count { get; set; }
        public double Time { get; set; }
        

        public override string ToString()
        {
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.Append(FullName);
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append(StartTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff"));
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append(EndTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff"));
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append(Time.ToString());
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append(ResultState.ToString());
            return sb.ToString();
        }

        public string GetContainerName()
        {
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.Append(BuildVersionNumber);
            sb.Append("_");
            sb.Append(AssemblyName);
            sb.Append("_");
            sb.Append(RunDateTime.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"));
            sb.Append("_");
            sb.Append(ComputerName);
            sb.Append("_");
            sb.Append(Count);

            return sb.ToString();
        }

        internal void StartRun(string name, int testCount)
        {
            RunDateTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
            Count = testCount;
            AssemblyName = GetAssemblyNameFromPath(name);
            BuildVersionNumber = GetAssemblyVersionFromPath(name);
            ComputerName = Environment.MachineName;
        }

        private string GetAssemblyVersionFromPath(string name)
        {
            var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();
            string assemblyNameFromPath = GetAssemblyNameFromPath(name);
            foreach( Assembly a in assemblies)
            {
                string testAssemblyName = (a.GetName()).Name + ".dll";
                if (String.Compare(testAssemblyName, assemblyNameFromPath, true) == 0)
                {
                    return a.GetName().Version.ToString();
                }
            }
            return "0.0.0000.0";
        }

        private string GetAssemblyNameFromPath(string name)
        {
            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(name))
            {
                FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(name);
                return fi.Name;
            }
            else
            {
                return "unknown";
            }
        }

        internal string GetHeader()
        {
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.Append("FullName");
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append("StartTime");
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append("EndTime");
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append("Duration");
            sb.Append(",");
            sb.Append("ResultState");
            return sb.ToString();
        }

        internal void StartTest(NUnit.Core.TestName testName)
        {
            StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
            FullName = testName.FullName;
        }

        internal void CompleteTest(NUnit.Core.TestResult result)
        {
            EndTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
            Time = result.Time;
            if (result.Executed)
            {
                if (result.IsSuccess)
                {
                    ResultState = 0; //Successfull assertions
                }
                if (result.IsFailure)
                {
                    ResultState = 1; //Failed assertion
                }
                if (result.IsError)
                {
                    ResultState = 2; //Error
                }
            }
            else
            {
                ResultState = -1; //Not run
            }
        }

        internal void CompleteTestWith(Exception exception)
        {
            EndTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
            Time = 0;
            ResultState = 2; //Error
        }
    }
}

EventTracer.cs

using System;
using NUnit.Core.Extensibility;
using NUnit.Core;
using NUnit.Framework;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;



namespace NUnitTestLogger
{
    [NUnitAddin(Description = "Event Timestamp Logger")]
    public class EventTimestampLogger : IAddin, EventListener
    {
        public bool Install(IExtensionHost host)
        {
            if (host == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("host");

            IExtensionPoint listeners = host.GetExtensionPoint("EventListeners");
            if (listeners == null)
                return false;

            listeners.Install(this);
            return true;
        }

        TestRecord testRecord = new TestRecord();
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();


        #region EventListener Members

        public void RunStarted(string name, int testCount)
        {
            testRecord.StartRun(name, testCount);
            string logFileName = GetLogFileName(testRecord);
            LogHeader(logFileName, testRecord);
        }

        public void RunFinished(TestResult result)
        {
            return;
        }

        public void SuiteStarted(TestName testName)
        {
            return;
        }

        public void TestStarted(TestName testName)
        {
            testRecord.StartTest(testName);
        }

        public void TestFinished(TestResult result)
        {
            testRecord.CompleteTest(result);
            string logFileName = GetLogFileName(testRecord);
            LogResult(logFileName, testRecord);
        }

        public void SuiteFinished(TestResult result)
        {
            return;
        }
        
        public void RunFinished(Exception exception)
        {
            testRecord.CompleteTestWith(exception);
            string logFileName = GetLogFileName(testRecord);
            LogResult(logFileName, testRecord);
        }


        private string GetLogFileName(TestRecord testRecord)
        {
            if (testRecord != null)
            {
                string fileName = testRecord.GetContainerName() + ".csv";
                string filePath = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments) + "\\" + fileName;
                return filePath;
            }
            else
            {
                return "testresultlog.csv";
            }
        }

        public void TestOutput(TestOutput testOutput)
        {
            return;
        }

        public void UnhandledException(Exception exception)
        {
            Debug.Write("UnhandledException " + exception);
        }

        private void LogHeader(string logFileName, TestRecord testRecord)
        {
            string message = testRecord.GetHeader();
            LogMessage(logFileName, message);
        }

        private void LogResult(string logFileName, TestRecord testRecord)
        {
            string message = testRecord.ToString();
            LogMessage(logFileName, message);
        }

        private void LogMessage(string logFileName, string message)
        {
            using (StreamWriter sw = File.AppendText(logFileName))
            {
                    sw.WriteLine(message);
            }
        }
        #endregion
    }
}

Installation

The Addin assemblies need to be copied into a folder called “addins”, which is a subfolder of the directory where the test runners like for example nunit.exe are located.

Figure 4: Addin assemblies location

NUnit will pick up and load the Addin assemblies automatically. The Registered Addins dialog shows which Addins have been loaded. For my assembly to load successfully in NUnit 2.5 it needed to be build for the x64 processor architecture using the .NET Framework 2.0 binding.

Figure 5: NUnit is loading Addins automatically

Download

The Visual Studio 2010 project with the built Addin assembly and an example test result CSV file can be downloaded here: NUnitTestLogger.zip

Ausblick

By the way, have you ever tried to specify a date time format in Excel that displays milliseconds? Here is how you can do it. Select the Custom Category in Format Cells and use the following format specifier: m/d/yyyy h:mm:ss.000

Figure 6: Excel custom format for displaying milliseconds in a date time field

US to metric volume conversion Excel spreadsheet

Klaus Graefensteiner — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:11:09 -1500

One A is x B

A lot of times I need an quick answer to questions like “How may liters is one Gallon?”. This blog post is my personal one-stop-shop for these kind of volume conversion factors.

Figure 1: Metric to US volume conversion table

Download

The conversion Excel spreadsheet can be downloaded here: VolumeMetricToUSConversions.zip

Ausblick

Happy converting!

Tellingmachine

Learning IOS Development the Doer way

Go shopping

For game development

Free reading

Interesting iOS frameworks

Interesting iOS apps to dissect

Interesting 3rd party libraries

Make it look and sound pretty

Hook up with some Business Intelligence services

Ausblick

NUnit Test Start and End Time Logging Add-in

Introduction

Reference links

File format

Addin implementation

TestRecord.cs

EventTracer.cs

Installation

Download

Ausblick

US to metric volume conversion Excel spreadsheet

One A is x B

Download

Ausblick