We Keep Coding

How can I measure dependency construction times?

I'm working with an open source ecommerce system written using C# and ASP.NET MVC 5. This package makes heavy use of autofac and IoC. It presents a plugin architecture that developers who work with this ecommerce package can use to create plugins, and it uses that plugin architecture itself.
Under some very mysterious circumstances (not just when the application domain recycles) it's taking a full minute to perform a page load. I've been struggling for a while to figure what's taking so long.
I haven't been able to get the application to run from within Visual Studio using the built in web server, and I haven't even been able to get the Visual Studio debugger to attach to an IIS process that is running it. So I haven't been able to use profilers that require Visual Studio.
I have managed to get Glimpse working, but Glimpse is not capturing the event that is taking a long time. In the time line, it shows "Start Request", which takes 0 ms, and then 7 to 50 seconds later, the next event starts, which is, for example, "Authorization: Home.Index", which it says took .01 ms.
What in the world is going on during that 7 to 50 second interval in between? How can I find that out?
Here's a somewhat strange clue: Today, after no change that we're aware of at all, suddenly the problem has more-or-less vanished (most of the time, at least temporarily) when the browser is on our internal network, but when the browser is on a computer outside our network, the problem persists. It's as if some plugin is doing some kind of DNS look up that is taking much less time (to succeed or fail) internally than it takes externally.
So conceivably, a controller is getting instantiated and some dependency or another from some plugin or another is doing some kind of network look up at construction time or something like that. So I'm trying to figure out how to measure how long it's taking MVC to construct each of the dependencies of the Home controller. So far, the solution has elluded me.
I guess I can maybe track down all the implementations of each of the dependencies and figure out which implementation is ending up getting used, and put log messages into their constructor code. Except some of the plugins don't provide source code. At least I can do it for the ones that do, anyway, but is there some profiler or tool I can use that doesn't require Visual Studio and works with ASP.NET MVC processes running under IIS?

Run CodedUI test to automate actions

Is there a way of running CodedUI steps outside a test project?
I want to use them to automate some actions in an application.

The program mstest.exe can be used to invoke Coded UI tests. Its /test:{test name}option allows a specific test (ie activity) to be executed, thus several different activities (ie tests) to be combined into one source file but only the desired activity is executed. Calling mstest.exe from a batch or Powershell script allows the activity to be executed without needing to type a long command each time.
If you already use Coded UI then there is no reason why it cannot be used for automating a series of GUI actions.
An example: For one project we needed to set a database from a backup before each series of tests. Manually that took 5 minutes and sometimes we did it wrong and so wasted time. With Coded UI it always worked and it ran quickly.

There's a significant amount of overhead involved in coded ui that you may not need in your automation task. To execute a coded ui test (and therefore run your automation), you'll need a full Visual Studio Professional or Test Controller/Test Agent installed on every machine that will be running the test/automation, and the machine will have to have a UI that is always available, I.E., a virtual machine configured so the desktop is always available and will not have interactions from another user.
Since your question was rather vague about what you want to automate, I can't really suggest anything in place of Coded UI, but it should be enough to say that you should use the tool that's best suited for the job at hand. Sure, you could use it to run your automation, but why would you want to? (insert imagery of a Corvette pulling a camper here)

windows service vs scheduled tasks

So this is my first stint with programmatically creating windows service or scheduled tasks and I am confused which one to choose. I had a look at various articles like http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/10/24/428303.aspx , scheduled task or windows service and some more but can' t really decide btween the two
Here is my scenario :
My application will pick up the code paths of a few dlls from the db , execute the DLLs using MSTest.exe and log back the results to the Db. this will probably be repeated every 2-3 hours . Now I am leaning a bit towards scheduled tasks since i won't have to worry about memory related issues but need some expert advice on this.
P.S. : The DLLs contain test methods that make calls to web services of applications deployed on various servers
Thanks in advance for the help

A Scheduled Task would be more appropiate for your scenario. I don't think it make a lot of sense building a scheduling mechanism on a windows service when OS already provides scheduling infraestructure.
A Windows service is more appropiate for processes that have to respond to events at any moment and not at specific and fix periods. That's why they are running all the time. An example of this is the SQL Server Service.
An exception of this could be a task that needs to run every second or so. In that corner case, a Window Service could be the best solution. For your specific schedule, I have no doubts that a scheduled task would fit much more better.

Although this post is several months old, here's a possible resolution in case it's helpful to others for the "Run whether the user is logged on or not" issue : start with a console project then change type to Windows App as mentioned at Run code once and exit formless app: Windows Forms or WPF... does it matter?:
“If you never show a UI, you should start with a WinForms project (WPF projects set extra project metadata that you don't want), then delete the reference to System.Windows.Forms.dll. Alternatively, start with a console project, then change the Output type to Windows Application.”

Setting up Build Server to run NUnit Selenium Automated tests

I've been assigned a task of setting up a build server (jenkins) and running automated tests after the build agent completes the build.
We are using NUnit and selenium to run automated tests.
The main concern is wait time. Suppose several users check in their sources, a build is run and automated tests are run afterwards (there could be several hundred of these). What's the best way to set this up so that each user does NOT have to wait in queue for tests results. Also, I'm to consider things like test result reports etc.
Where do I start? What do I even google?
I'm very new at this stuff and any info on doing this would be greatly appreciated. thanks

The first thing you'll want to do is to separate your unit tests from your integration tests.
Unit tests should be fast. Integration tests will obviously be slower since you're interacting with external components.
As far as configuring your environment, to do what you're trying to do properly, you'll need to research using Jenkins in a Master/multiple-Slave configuration. This isn't terribly complex, but can take some time to set up.
What you'll likely end up doing is setting up a number of Jobs within Selenium to handle each part of your build process. ie, one job to do the compilation, at least one job to run the unit tests, and at least one job to run the integration tests (and then maybe packaging or deployment jobs depending on how far you want to take this..).
Depending on how slow your overall build process is, you could easily have one job for each component's integration tests and run these concurrently on different slave machines. A parent job could would then aggregate the results and determine whether or not the chick-in passed.
For reporting, you'll want to install the HTML Publisher Plugin, and the NUnit Plugin. These plugins will allow you to bundle the reports produced with the rest of the build artifacts.
In order to give feedback to your team, you'll also want to look at the Wall Display Plugin to display the status of the jobs.

Has anyone found a way to run C# Selenium RC tests in parallel?

Has anyone found a way to run Selenium RC / Selenium Grid tests, written in C# in parallel?
I've currently got a sizable test suite written using Selenium RC's C# driver. Running the entire test suite takes a little over an hour to complete. I normally don't have to run the entire suite so it hasn't been a concern up to now, but it's something that I'd like to be able to do more regularly (ie, as part of an automated build)
I've been spending some time recently poking around with the Selenium Grid project whose purpose essentially is to allow those tests to run in parallel. Unfortunately, it seems that the TestDriven.net plugin that I'm using runs the tests serially (ie, one after another). I'm assuming that NUnit would execute the tests in a similar fashion, although I haven't actually tested this out.
I've noticed that the NUnit 2.5 betas are starting to talk about running tests in parallel with pNUnit, but I haven't really familiarized myself enough with the project to know for sure whether this would work.
Another option I'm considering is separating my test suite into different libraries which would let me run a test from each library concurrently, but I'd like to avoid that if possible since I'm not convinced this is a valid reason for splitting up the test suite.

I am working on this very thing and have found Gallio latest can drive mbUnit tests in parallel. You can drive them against a single Selenium Grid hub, which can have several remote control servers listening.
I'm using the latest nightly from Gallio to get the ParallelizableAttribute and DegreeOfParallelismAttribute.
Something things I've noticed is I cannot rely on TestSet and TestTeardown be isolated the parallel tests. You'll need the test to look something like this:
[Test] public void Foo(){
var s = new DefaultSelenium("http://grid", 4444, "*firefox",
"http://server-under-test");
s.Start();
s.Open("mypage.aspx");
// Continue
s.Stop();
}
Using the [SetUp] attribute to start the Selenium session was causing the tests to not get the remote session from s.Start().

I wrote PNUnit as an extension for NUnit almost three years ago and I'm happy to see it was finally integrated into NUnit.
We use it on a daily basis to test our software under different distros and combinations. Just to give an example: we've a test suite of heavy tests (long ones) with about 210 tests. Each of them sets up a server and runs a client in command line running several operations (up to 210 scenarios).
Well, we use the same suite to run the tests on different Linux combinations and windows variations, and also combined ones like a windows server with a linux client, windows xp, vista, then domain controller, out of domain, and so on. We use the same binaries and then just have "agents" launched at several boxes.
We use the same platform for: balancing load test load -> I mean, running in chunks faster. Running several combinations at the same time, and what I think is more interesting: defining multi client scenarios: two clients wait for the server to start up, then launch operations, synch with each other and so on. We also use PNUnit for load testing (hundreds of boxes against a single server).
So, if you have any questions about how to set it up (which is not simple yet, I'm afraid), don't hesitate to ask.
Also I wrote an article long ago about it at DDJ: http://www.ddj.com/architect/193104810
Hope it helps

I don't know if no answer counts as an answer but I'd say you have researched everything and you really came up with the 2 possible solutions...
Test Suite runs tests in parallel
Split the test suite up
I am at a loss for any thing else.