This week was short work-wise, and went by quickly. Last week was hectic and long. Me and my colleague Truls gave a seminar on NHibernate, a little ActiveRecord and some of the new MS OR stuff. Then I spent three days with another consulting company, showing them the ins and outs of NHibernate and sprinkling just a little WCF on the last day. In so doing, I caught myself serving out some code that I have used. Normally, I don't dish out any code here, but this might be useful to some:

It's a small WCF test helper that I have used to do explorative testing of WCF and even more so for integrative smoke tests of WCF services.

There is a zip attached that contains one vs.net 2005 project with a WCF hello world and one nunit test that runs that service. That test is an integration test, it cranks up the whole WCF machinery. Most of my WCF integration tests (all, in fact) do not test any concurrency issues. They are more simple smoke tests that everything seems to work as expected. What I usually want is to test the machinery but have one instance invoked, so that I can execute some assertions on the results using that instance afterwards.

Usually, you will not implement your WCF service as a singleton (although it is one of the instancing modes), for one of several reasons - scalability for example. Using the other instancing modes means that you (by default) do not control construction of your the instance that gets to serve the requests, and thus in a test situation, we do not have a reference to the instance used by WCF. One way around this is to create a custom instance provider. The instance provider in WCF (class implementing IInstanceProvider, the default being a private class in InstanceBehavior, reflect it) is responsible for supplying new service instances. I won't talk about it here, suffice it to say that my SingletonInstanceProvider simply returns one (settable) instance each time, thus making the service a singleton. It is a service behavior that we add to the servicehost description.

Why do this? Simply so that I can implement my service using an instancing mode that I want, but still run simple smoke tests on it. It is one solution, there are doubtless many others, if you have a better one, please give me a shout.

So, the testhelper or testharness that is enclosed actually does a couple of things. I won't talk about them in detail, this is roughly it:

• Provide a simple way to create and start a service host and get a client to run tests against it.
• Provide a way for tests to share services, so that the WCF machinery does not need to be restarted.
• Get the services set up using the SingletonInstanceProvider easily
• Allow test to access host before it is started to modify/further configure
  ( this is why you see castle in there, the client (a dynamic proxy wrapper) is actually a proxy that opens the service late/JIT )

You use it like so:

IMessageOfTheDay client1 = GetClient

   .For<IMessageOfTheDay>()

   .Using(new NetTcpBinding())

   .Running(serviceInstance);

This sets up a service host for the IMessageOfTheDay service contract, using the netTcpBinding (optional, default is named pipes since it is the fastest) and running the instance supplied. See the demotest.

Comments welcome. Btw, this uses my singleton implementation, I'll make a note of that tomorrow, but it's simple.

Questions: Has anyone seen another wcf test harness like this? I usually do all my network integration testing using some thread harness with synchronization between, and did my WCF testing in a similar (not the same) way. This harness simplified things quite a bit.

BTW: Most of the code is in one file; TestHelper.cs. It's a bit unwieldly, sorry, but easier to copy - you still need the singleton.cs though. I may update later if I get time.

Again, the download is here.

At the latest AgileØresund meeting we had the usual mix of new and old people representing both devs/techleads and project managers. I (again) wanted to talk about team morale. Being a consultant I get to move between company cultures quite often, which allows me to more easily see and experience differences among them. Having worked for some of the larger traditional companies in Sweden, this is a most fascinating aspect. It is fun to reason about how the company culture has been devised and/or emerged, and what the logic behind it is - what must have been the benefits the leaders saw when promoting some values inside the organization? Morale in a team comes both from the context - from "upwards" if you like - and from within the team. A team needs a vision in order to believe in the work they do. If you do not think that the work you do will matter to anyone at all, then you are not likely to invest heavily in the work. From within the team, a breach of morale will spread: If someone looses faith in the project, that may spread and will at the least affect the others.

I think there is a junction where these things meet; how we express our faith and passion can become a heuristic that is then expected - a mindless rule that the team has to work overtime at some point, that the team has to do this and that. (Well, blindly following rules is almost never good, nothing new there.) This junction is basically where acting and appearances are more important than actual results. Acting and appearances are naturally very important, but are not directly related to the results.

Anyway, Chris mentioned this post from Kathy Sierra (I don't read her blog regularly anymore myself) that talks about the target of passion - company or work. I really see a connection to her post.

There was a project called the Netron project a while  back, that offered a nice graphing library and several related libraries. I used to check the blog regularly, to see progress, and so on. I stopped for a year or more, but not so long ago, I ventured to do so again. I got really suprised, and went to do some checking. Check this adress, you may be surprised to:

http://netron.sourceforge.net/

Don't read on until you've checked it!

Checked it?

Were you surprised? I sure was. If you did not bother to check it, the sourceforge project page has been emptied of all contents (don't know if the source was ever hosted there though, here is someone saying that the CVS repos were removed, which would be very odd indeed). The project homepage link instantly redirects you to an ordering page for a graphing product "Go Diagram". Basically, an ordering page on sourceforge! Odd!

In summary, Netron was an open source project that did not use a well known license, but the license was a "use anyway you want" type of thing. It appears to be affiliated with this go diagram commercial venture, but there is no indication of how or why. I don't think there is anything wrong about that, per se. These things feel strange to me, though:

• The redirect from sourceforge to the order page.
• Not leaving a trace of the OS project - after you have accepted donations to the open source project. Check out the thankyou note to "Axel" at the end of this page.

It looks strange, and not pretty. If I had to call it by the looks of things, someone went commercial with the stuff and (perhaps even as insiduously as being part of some agreement?) removed all content they had control over, everywhere (sourceforge, codeproject articles, etc).

Other people have written about this, I wanted to note my own findings here. Do note this posting. There is a resurrection project for the source here, and much of the previously available documentation is hosted here. You can of course browse the archived versions of the homepage, archived codeproject article, and blog. It is strange, isn't it?

(Photo: Tony Richards, Herford)