Roslyn and unit tests suck

Home

Title: Imperial Gardens in Tokyo, Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I'm working on the project where I have an opportunity to use Roslyn compiler as a service. It is very good :) However yesterday it took me more than 2 hours to write working unit tests (based on MSTest) for my code! Here are some tips that may save your time.

Let's start with the simle thing. When I run unit tests for the first time the following exception was thrown:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Runtime...' or one of its dependencies.

To fix this problem I simply installed the following packages via Nuget:

• Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp
• Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces

Later it was harder. In my code I use MSBuildWorkspace.OpenSolutionAsync and MSBuildWorkspace.OpenProjectAsync methods to respectively open the entire solution or a single project for further processing.

The next issue was that the first method called from within a unit test was returning an empty solution i.e. without any projects. Whereas the second one was throwing an exception with the message: The language 'C#' is not supported. What was strange these problems occurred only in unit tests! To investigate a problem I opened Exception settings window in Visual Studio and selected a check box next to Common Language Runtime Exceptions. Then, I run the unit tests one more time and Visual Studio quickly reported the exception in the line with MSBuildWorkspace.OpenProjectAsync:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces...' or one of its dependencies.

It was even more strange because my unit test project was actually referencing Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces.dll! To double check, I went to the unit tests working directory. It is a folder called TestResults which by default is located in the solution directory. To my surprised this dll was missing!

Fortunately, I reminded myself the similar situation from the past. The problem is that MSTest doesn't copy all assemblies to the output directory by default. As far as I know it tries to figure out which assemblies are really needed by the code being tested. Here, I'm not sure but Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces.dll may be cumbersome because it is not directly referenced by other Roslyn assemblies. Instead, it is probably loaded dynamically when needed.

To fix a problem you can use the simple hack i.e. use directly any code from Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces.dll in your unit tests in the following way:

[ClassInitialize]
public static void ClassInitialize(TestContext ctx)
{
   var t = typeof(Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Formatting.LabelPositionOptions);
}

Why did I use LabelPositionOptions? Because majority of types defined in aforementioned assembly is internal and this one was the first public type I found :)

Report from the battlefield #8 - always remember about the context

Home

Title: Sunrise seen from the top of Mount Fuji, , Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I decided to change a little bit a character of Report from the battlefield series. Initially, in this series, I was describing my observations from my work as a reviewer for a recruitment company. Now, I'll be also writing about my findings from my day-to-day work. To start, I'll give you a tip how to log useful information.

I worked with an application that is responsible for monitoring folders. If it detects any new files, they are processed and copied somewhere else. The application logs information like the number of files to be processes, the file that is currently being processed etc. This information are logged with severity Information or Debug. It happens that a given file cannot be copied for example because the file with the same name already exists in the destination directory. In that case .NET throws System.IO.IOException. This exception is caught and logged with the severity Error. The simplified version of the log could look in this way:

INFO - 10 files have been found
INFO - Processing file started
...
INFO - Processing file ended
INFO - Processing file started
ERROR - An error occurred while processing a file: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.
...
INFO - Processing file ended
...

It's good that many important information are logged. However, there is a major issue with this log. The lack of the context! For example we know that some files have been processed but we don't know which exactly. This log should look as follows (I used red color to mark changes):

INFO - 10 files have been found in the directory 'C:\Input'
INFO - Processing file 'C:\Input\a.txt' started
...
INFO - Processing file 'C:\Input\a.txt' ended
INFO - Processing file 'C:\Input\b.txt' started
ERROR - An error occurred while processing a file: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.
...
INFO - Processing file 'C:\Input\b.txt' ended
...

It looks much better. Based on the log we can figure out which directory was monitored, which files have been processed successfully and which not. However, it's not everything. There is one more subtle problem here. What if messages with the severity Information or lower won't be logged (for example because of performance issues) and an error will be reported. In this case we'll get the following log:

...
ERROR - An error occurred while processing a file: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.
...

It's better than nothing but again we don't know processing of which file has actually failed. The expected result is:

...
ERROR - An error occurred while processing a file 'C:\Input\b.txt': Cannot create a file when that file already exists.
...

To sum up, always remember about the context when logging.