Solution Folders To Group Projects

While reading Scott Guthrie's blog today I stumbled upon one of his links of the day for december 8th entitled Big Solutions Can Be Organized Using Solution Folders which is at the .NET Tip of the Day web site.

Actually, this is really cool. Am I the only schmuck who didn't realize this was possible? I have used Solution Folders in the past, but it was always to group files which were not part of the actual build process. For example we always had a Libraries folder which contained the third party dlls which need to be referenced to build the project. This way all a developer needs to do to build the project is to download the latest source code, and the solution will automatically download the needed referenced assemblies. Plus any upgrade we do to a third party dll automatically propagates when someone gets latest.

But the ability to place projects within the folders to group them together? This will actually be very handy for us. At work our current solution has 33 projects, and truthfully it is growing! Being able to group the projects which are similar or somehow related will really come in handy for us.

Why didn't I realize this sooner?

--John Chapman

VSTS Web Test Error Found

I previously mentioned that I was intrigued by the Visual Studio 2005 Web Test feature, but was having issues with actually running my tests on an application which uses Forms Authentication (See the prior post: Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition Web Test)

Well it turns out I found my answer, and I don't like it. I found a knowledge base on MSDN which describes my issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936005). It turns out that Forms Authentication doesn't work at all! This is after I saw other places that seemed to indicate it would work flawlessly.

How in the world does this make it out the door? They say they have a hotfix for it (which you have to go through holy hell to actually get btw), but why is it a hotfix and not at least something which was fixed by SP1? People, Visual Studio 2005 has been out for over 2 years, and this basic piece of functionality still doesn't work? How is that acceptable?

The quote in the "Cause" section of the knowledge base is priceless.

This problem occurs because the cookies in Visual Studio 2005 Team System use the Request for Comments (RFC) specification. However, some Web browsers do not use the RFC specification. For example, Internet Explorer does not use the RFC specification.

I would have expected Internet Explorer to have been the one browser Microsoft actually tested with. How would Microsoft put out a tool that doesn't properly support its own browser?

I'm not sure if I'll just wait for Visual Studio 2008 to see if that resolves my issues (it is due for release this month after all) or if I should look for a way to run my tests without using Forms Authentication.

--John Chapman

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition Web Test

Recently I have become very interested in Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition's Web Test testing feature. I'm a firm believer in unit testing and we use them heavily at work. However, for front end testing we've always relied on hand testing. There are regression tests with go with every release, but unfortunately for us due to the size of the system only a random portion of those tests are ran for each release.

We've been interested in automated front end testing tools for a long time. I thought the Web Test would be perfect for what we were looking for. Unfortunately this is not my current top priority and only a small amount of time has been spent researching how to use the tool, but so far no go!

We use forms authentication for our application. I'm able to record a basic test which involves logging in to the application, but when the test is played back it doesn't work! The user is never authenticated. I verified the user name and password in the coded test. Everything looks right, yet it doesn't work! The fun part of it is that after logging in the test is supposed to go to a new page in the system, but since the user has not been authenticated the system returns a page stating that the user is not authorized to access the page. The built in test checks call that a success! It passes the test because it received a 200 response. I know I can add my own validation, but I thought it would have at least checked the URL to see if it matched the recording.

So while I was able to find walk through documentation from Microsoft nothing explained forms authentication. Does anyone reading this have experience testing forms authentication applications? I thought it was just supposed to pass the user/password to the form and be done with it. Is there something I'm missing.

On the plus side I am looking forward to the web test enhancements which are built in to Visual Studio 2008. I'm actually pretty exited about the pending release. I believe it should be available any day to MSDN subscribers. I enjoy feeling like a kid again every time a new version of Visual Studio is being released!

If I'm able to resolve my issues reasonably soon you can rest assured a new blog post will be made describing how I resolved it. Wish me luck!

--John Chapman