Introduction

A few weeks ago I set up my first automated build pipeline in Visual Studio Team Services. For the most part it was fairly easy to setup and configure, but I ran into some issues getting my xUnit tests to run. The fix is simple, but I figure I will not be setting up these builds very often and I do not want to have to figure it out again in the future.

The Problem

Note: These instructions apply to the full .NET Framework, not .NET Core. I followed the instructions in the xUnit documentation for configuring the test runner for VSTS. The documentation said to set the Test Assembly field to the following:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\*test*.dll;-:**\xunit.runner.visualstudio.testadapter.dll

However, when the test step of the pipeline would execute, it would raise a warning that it could not find any test assemblies that conformed to the above pattern. I tried fiddling with the other options, but the pipeline still could not locate the test assemblies.

The Solution

Thankfully, the solution is very simple. Instead of setting the Test Assembly field to a one line expression, break it into two lines and remove the trailing semicolon:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\*test*.dll
-:**\xunit.runner.visualstudio.testadapter.dll

Once I made this change, the test step was able to find the test assembly and execute the tests. My best guess is that a VSTS update made changes to the Test Assembly field and the xUnit documentation has not been updated yet.

Hopefully this blog post will help others who run into this issue, as well as future me next time I need to setup a VSTS build.

Hexo Global License

One of the Pelican features I really liked was the global license plugin. This plugin took a configurable string representing a license statement and placed it into the footer of every page on the site. In my case, this was pretty handy as I license all of my blog content as CC-BY-SA and this way I did not have to remember to include an explicit license statement on each post.

Hexo did not have this functionality, so I sat down and built a Hexo plugin to mimic the behavior of the Pelican plugin. Thus, hexo-global-license was born. Since I use a Creative Commons license for all of my content, I built in support for all of the latest Creative Commons licenses. Add the appropriate settings to the config.yml file and the plugin will add the appropriate license text, image and link to the Creative Commons website. In the case where you want to use a different license, you can set the license type to custom and then include the text you want in the configuration.

The plugin is available on npm, and once I use it some more and shake out any major bugs I will submit it for inclusion in the Hexo plugins registry. If you try it and encounter problems, or if you have ideas to improve it please file an issue on the GitHub page.

Hexo is Live

If you are reading this, then the transition to Hexo has completed successfully. Hopefully the redirects are all working properly and new articles are showing up in your favorite feed reader. This should remove a lot of my blogging friction and make it easier for me to write articles more often.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to posting some new material soon.

Moving to Hexo

Just a heads-up for anybody who subscribes to this blog via RSS or ATOM. Sometime within the next week I will be migrating this blog from Pelican to Hexo. Pelican has served me well the past several years, but it is starting to cause enough problems that I want to try another static site generator. Pelican is a little awkward to run under Windows. For Python programs like Pelican, I typically install them inside of some form of virtual environment like virtualenv or an Anaconda environment. This means I have to remember to switch environments which I usually forget to do until I get strange errors trying to work with Pelican. Managing the plugins and themes is also somewhat different. I do not change either very often, and I end up having to read the documentation every time I want to add or update something. The final reason I am moving away from Pelican is it is rather slow. It takes a good 30-40 seconds to regenerate the site every time I hit save in my editor. This is really painful when experimenting with page layout for a new article.

After trying out a few different static site generators, I have settled on Hexo for the next version of my blog site. Hexo is a Node.js application and is a much smoother experience on Windows. During development, my site can regenerate in 3-5 seconds, which I really like. Plus, plugins and themes are all managed through npm which makes it easy to keep things updated.

The one downside to Hexo is it will not allow me to have both RSS and ATOM feeds. Going forward, the site will have an ATOM feed and a new JSON Feed. I am going to have automatic redirects configured that should route requests from the old feeds to the ATOM feed. Most feed readers that I know of understand both RSS and ATOM, so this should be seamless for most readers. I have a test post queued up for next week after I make the move, so if you are not seeing new content by then I would suggest manually updating your subscription.

Hopefully this will be a relatively smooth transition.

Thanks for reading!

Introduction

This is a quick blog post to document my experience with building serverless
web APIs with Azure Functions. Recently, I was building an API where I
wanted to receive an XML message in the body of the HTTP trigger, but I did
not want the Functions framework to attempt to deserialize the data. I
wanted to receive the raw input so I could pass it as-is to another API.

HTTP Trigger Template

When you create a new Azure Function, the default template will use the
following statement to read the body of the HTTP request:

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dynamic data = await req.Content.ReadAsAsync<object>();

This statement will attempt to deserialize the HTTP request body by using the
Content-Type header to choose a serializer component. By default it supports
the JSON and XML serializers, but you can define and register your own custom
serializer too. In order for the serializer to work properly, you need to have
a classs with the appropriate decorators so the serializer knows how to map
the data to the class properties.

In my use case, I was not going to do anything with the data other than pass
it on to another API, so I did not want to incur the overhead of
deserializing/serializing the data. Instead, you can change the above
statement to read the body as a string. When reading the data as a string,
the framework will not attempt to deserialzie the data.

To read the body as a string, replace the above statement with this:

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string data = await req.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

Conclusion

It turns out getting the raw input is nothing more than a simple statement
change. All it takes is changing the statement from reading the data as an
object to reading it as a string. Now I have it documented for the next time
I need to do something similar in Azure Functions.

This article originally posted at https://scottbanwart.com/blog/2017/07/azure-functions-raw-input

Yeoman Generator for Morepath

I have been playing around a bit with the Morepath microservices framework for Python lately. I noticed in the Morepath documentation that there is a Cookiecutter template for scaffolding new projects. On a lark, I wanted to see how hard it would be to build a Yeoman template for Morepath. I have wanted to learn about building custom Yeoman templates to set up new projects with the proper structure and dependencies for my work projects. Since I did not see an existing Morepath template on the NPM site, I figured I would try and build one myself.

In its current state, it just sets up a basic skeleton project, but as I learn more about Morepath I plan on adding more features. If anybody is interested in trying it out, it is available on NPM. Anybody interested in how I built it, and how bad my JavaScript code is, can check out the project repository on GitHub.

Over the past few months I have been slowly learning about modern web development. The last time I worked on a web project .NET 2.0 was the new hotness, so I have a lot of catching up to do. After checking out a few of the more popular frameworks out there I chose React as the framework for building web-based user interfaces. I chose React because of its popularity and support, tight focus on views and its affinity for functional programming.

A common feature in modern applications is support for automatically saving. This is seen in desktop applications like Microsoft Office, and nearly every mobile application out there. I wanted to see if I could replicate that behavior inside of a React application.

The systems I have seen that implement this feature send a save event after every change. In a web application, this would generate a lot of network activity so wanted to try implementing this feature using an idle timer. The application starts the timer after any user activity and tracks changes to the form state. The timer resets every time there is user activity to prevent triggering a save while the user is still actively changing the form data. Once the timer expires, it fires an event where the application would perform the save functionality. In the case of my test applcation, it resets the tracking state and outputs a message stating that it saved successfully. The full application code can be found on GitHub in my react-auto-save repository.

Another year has come and gone. Time for another favorite books blog post. I may not be doing the best job of blogging, but at least I am consistent with my year-end entry.
This past year I came closer to burning out than I would like to admit, so I spent more time reading fun books instead of technology books. I still managed to read some good
technical books, so without further ado let us take a look at the list.

Note: None of the links below are affiliate links. I get nothing from linking to these books. I try to link to the author or publisher site when possible, and Amazon as the default.

Favorite Books 2016

• The Phoenix Project - While not a true technical book, this was still an interesting read. It is a novelization of the problems encountered in a typical IT organziation and how the applied DevOps techniques to solve them.
• Concurrency in C# Cookbook - I have been getting into more concurrent and reactive programming lately. This book provides concrete examples on how to use the Async/Await and TaskParallel features to build concurrent applications in .NET using C#.
• Dependency Injection in .NET - This is the definitive book on properly applying dependency injection techniques and tools in .NET. I really like that the concepts are taught without the use of a DI framework. This makes the techniques applicable to multiple implementations.
• Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET - This is a free eBook from O’Reilly that gives a good overview of the tools and options available for implementing CD pipelines on the Windows and .NET platforms.
• Hidden Empire - This is the first book in a science-fiction novel series that I really enjoyed. If you are into “space opera” like Star Wars or Babylon 5, I would suggest checking it out.
• Storm Front - This is the first book in the Dresden Files, a fantasy series following a private detective detwizard who investigates supernatural mysteries in the modern world. Think Harry Potter crossed with Philip Marlowe.

Moving Complete

If you are reading this, then you are looking at this blog at its new home at http://scottbanwart.com. Just a reminder that links to rogue-technology.com will redirect here for a while, but you will want to update any bookmarks you have to the old domain.

Thanks again for reading!

A New Home

Sometime within the next two weeks I will be moving this blog to a new domain. “Rogue Technology” was my “doing business as” name when I decided to become an independent consultant many years ago. That venture never really went anywhere and I have decided that it is time to clean out the old and bring in the new.

The new domain will be http://scottbanwart.com. Assuming I get everything configured correctly, links to rogue-technology.com will continue to work for a while. If your feed reader supports HTTP 301 redirects everything should update itself automatically. If you have bookmarks, you will probably want to change once the new domain is live.

Thanks again for reading.