Sunday, September 16, 2007

NCoverExplorer... v1.4.0

I've had this "quietly available" on the download page for a few weeks to gain feedback on any issues and with no known issues outstanding it seems appropriate to more publicly announce it.

A big change in NCoverExplorer 1.4.0 is that it is no longer published under the GPL license. I made this change for a number of reasons; amongst which was the concern that a number of companies have of deploying GPL based tools into their development process. This roadblock has been removed and should no longer prevent your companies from using this toolset.

My original choice of GPL was based on using the ICSharpCode 1.x texteditor control. I have now dropped that component in favour of using the superior (but commercial) Actipro SyntaxEditor control instead. The improvements are not only in stability and features but also visual as you can see below in the code highlighting screenshot. A splitter window is available as also shown.


So why should you upgrade to NCoverExplorer 1.4?

This release is less about adding new features (although there are some to be found) and more about stabilisation for the future. The core model code has been rewritten and better tested. There have been countless code coverage corner cases (say that five times in a row!) arise that should be better catered for. Better performance for .NET 2.0 users, lower resource usage, better error handling and some minor gui quirks addressed.

Some of the "internal" changes have spilled over externally. For instance the configuration file format used by NCoverExplorer.Console with /c has changed to support new features, although I have retained legacy compatibility for those who choose not to upgrade their build scripts immediately.

What about the new features? Well, the ones I did squeeze in were...
  • Support for the //pm (profiling a process by name) argument in NCover 1.5.8;
  • Copy command in the source code text area via right-click;
  • Print preview command in the File menu;
  • /fc argument for NCoverExplorer.Console to fail a build if the combined total coverage of all assemblies does not meet the minimum specified. This was the original behaviour of the /f command before it was changed to fail if any individual assembly does not meet the minimum;
  • Coverage exclusions now support the '?' wildcard and multiple '*' wildcards within the expression.
  • Report xml contains a "totalSeqPoints" attribute as requested for developers writing alternate xsl reports that need to calculate the excluded code at each level;
  • Update the NAnt/MSBuild task dlls to support the latest changes;
  • Redesigned the options dialog as shown below;


Downloads
Release Notes

2 Comments:

At September 19, 2007 4:45 pm, Blogger GraemeF said...

Hi, having upgraded to 1.4.0 I seem to be stuck at 95% for the acceptance percentage in NCoverExplorer.Console.exe.

I've tried as many variations of "/minCoverage" as I can think of but no luck!

Also, it would be good to be able to give a different % for /f and /fc when trying to get some coverage on legacy code.

Cheers,
G.

 
At September 19, 2007 8:22 pm, Blogger kiwidude said...

Graeme,

I think perhaps you are getting confused with the "satisfactory coverage threshold" which defaults to 95% and has no command line option to override (you have to do it via a settings file). If you look at the console output you should see some text like "Fail If:" which should have the value of your /minCoverage:xx command.

If still not sure please post to the support forums at NCover.com and can help you out on there...

 

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