AltCover -- the road to .net 5, F# 5, and GitHub actions

A for the record listing of what was needed to make the transition for a project that's over a decade old -- the current GitHub repo is only 3 years old, but that was formed by grafting the relevant contents of the original 2010-vintage SVN history onto a 2H17 git bootstrap.

In the original 10Q2-11Q1 development, the build system was a PowerShell script that called msbuild on the .net3.5 solution, then did an automated copy and edit to also build against .net4; taking up the reins again in 17Q3, the latter were used as the basis for going forwards. Over time, parallel .net core projects were added, which eventually subsumed the originals.

Thus, on the eve of the .net5 release, we had

• A main solution targeting net472 (debug only) and netstandard2.0 for libraries; net472, netcoreapp2.0 and netcoreapp2.1 for tooling with netcoreapp3.0 for unit tests
• A separate solution building a net20 library (the run-anywhere recorder) plus tests at net20/net472/netcoreapp3.0
• A separate solution for the GUI tool, targeting net472 (debug only) and netstandard2.0 for libraries, net472 with a reference to the GTK2# assemblies in the GAC, and netcoreapp2.1 for tooling and netcoreapp3.0 for unit tests
• Finally a solution for building a front end to the Mono C# compiler library, used to provide test data, still in the old project style

So, all very good and mostly modern -- the transition should have been trivial then...

Not so fast...

Once I had the F#5 compiler installed, that broke the net20 build (looking for a System.Numerics.dll which was still part of FSharp.Core in net20). Applying an earlier F# compiler via NuGet package fixed that in Visual Studio, but then dotnet build failed, so I had to resort to msbuild-ing the recorder solution. But then on the travis-ci build, that meant that the net5.0 (upgraded from netcoreapp3.0) unit test target got interpreted as .net Framework 5.0, and the build failed for lack of approprate referenced assemblies. So, as you were before with the unit tests, at least for the moment.

At this point, one obvious result of maintaining backwards compatibility by building deliverable executables (and unit tests) against older netcoreapp* targets, but with "rollForwardOnNoCandidateFx": 2 in runtimeconfig.template.json was a profusion of NETSDK1138 obsolescence warnings; silenced by building with /p:CheckEolTargetFramework="false" all around.

Where I'd been running ahead of AppVeyor's current installed .net SDKs, I'd been using Chocolatey to bring down the version I wanted; time to be aware that the package has been renamed from dotnetcore-sdk to dotnet-sdk instead.

That got things building on the "traditional" CI servers, so, a good time to make a first try of GitHub Actions for CI as well.

With the at-time-of-writing latest windows and linux platforms, that meant that I didn't have a "modern enough" msbuild.exe on the PATH for the recorder and the GUI tool. To resolve that, I resorted to finding the path of the MSBuild.dll from the current .net5 SDK (via parsing the output of dotnet --info for the Base Path: value), and lashing up a way to use it with Fake's MSBuild command line construction support.

Fall-out from this was needing to compile string resources ahead of time for the recorder -- no ResGen.exe support in the new regime -- and use the same (earlier) compiler for all the test platforms; also creating a set of reference assemblies for GTK#2, so I could avoid having any reference to the GAC (meaning that the GUI tool solution would now dotnet build, even if I still have to MSBuild the recorder solution). The Mono C# compiler project -- also using MSBuild -- which still made references out to .targets files out in Visual Studio or Windows SDK parts of MSBuildExtensionsPath32-land also needed attention; as a retro project, I simply added the earlier F# compiler package here, too, to make it build.

On the plus side, now the net20 project is using the MSBuild executable from the net5 SDK, switching the unit tests all round to target net5.0 works as one would hope it to work.

Yamako "Yoko" Yulan 23-Oct-2007 - 3-Nov-2020

Yoko on a fencepost, mid-August 2020

She was the cat who rarely did anything to make me take photographs of her by herself, and then mostly by being the one who went out first in the morning to find somewhere sunny to sleep, so was rarely being at all dignified at the time. She was also the cat who put a halt to staying-on-the-bed privileges, on account of getting up in the small hours and wandering about wailing, and the one who ended demand feeding, by ballooning up, and thus meaning us having to strictly weigh all the cats' food.

Early September, she suddenly lost weight, and the vet diagnosed a lymphoma; so then it was a case of nursing her through the last weeks, where she got totally pampered, offered all sorts of treat-food (with plenty of leavings for the others to hoover up), and getting stay-on-the-bed privilege, as she would now just curl up and sleep through the night. On Monday, she was still happily wandering around, even going out to drink rainwater from plant saucers and then bask in the sun in the greenhouse; Tuesday, she had no appetite, and when she crawled off the bed, fell and just lay there, so it was, alas, time to say goodbye.

In those last weeks, it was hard to remember that this elegant, if scrawny, cat who could just sit hunched up on my forearm had been quite the great chubby lump in her younger days

October cycling

On the summer bike starting at 3553.7, and ending at 3583.1, and winter bike from 17251.2 to 17313.5 for a total of 91.6 (YTD 2110), with a small number of drop-outs from a loose connection on the latter, maybe up to 1/2 a mile. The weather stayed mild all month, but was generally windy and wet, so the run of riding every day that started on the Bank Holiday weekend came to a stop.

This was almost all going somewhere (market, dentist) miles; fortunately I managed to stay dry apart from the very last day of the month, doing a resupply run ahead of the coming lockdown, where it went from vaguely spitting to absolutely tipping it down in the last couple of miles of the return leg.

While I again managed more miles this month than the same time last year (just), November is not April, so any rides for exercise will be limited -- probably shan't get to see the new Abbey bridge until almost Christmas.