Teamcity – Automate to find Broken Links on your website

If you work on a website , one of the smoke tests for your website could be to check that no links on your site are broken. And if the CI server can do this on every check-in there is nothing better than that as you can keep an eye it for every change. Further repurposing such a test as a smoke test for every deployment or even for monitoring purposes is extremely useful productive - good luck doing this manually  (When done on Live make sure there is a filter in Google Analytics for your test machines to be excluded)

Off the many tools available out there, the application at http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/ seems to fit the bill for CI, Supports several modes see docs for more info

Download it and install it on your development machine

To run the test locally (should install linkchecker-8.1 on the machine), you could run the following command eg."C:\Program Files (x86)\LinkChecker\linkchecker.exe" http://sometesturl.com/ --file-output=html/report.html --recursion-level=-1

This has to be installed on all TeamCity agents. To hook up a build add a build step as below which is equivalent to the command above

This will allow you to hook a build on Teamcity to run a test which spiders through your site checking for broken links.

The command above produces a report with the name linkchecker-report.html in the agents working folder. If you push this html as an artifact and add a report tab on the Teamcity server called “Link Checker Report” for the linkchecker-report.html artifiac, you should be able to see the report after every build is run

For broken links the build will fail as linkchecker will return a code 1 on the command line, for success builds it returns a 0

See below for an example report which uses report tabs on teamcity to show the report

ScrewTurn Wiki

I was looking for a some kind of ASP.Net sample site purely to demo some BDD scenarios at work, but then I wanted to do it on a site which is more complex than the usual ASP.Net sample site made of Customer/Order.

I found a couple of Wikis, but the one that caught my eye was ScrewTurn Wiki. First things first it is free under the GPLv2 license (for more details on commercial licenses see Commercial License Help)

The installation took less than a few minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform installer, You install the Wiki in one of two modes file system storage mode or SqlServer storage mode (just use SqlExpress). To choose which mode you want to install. See Installation Help for more details. Apparently you can go with file storage mode and then switch to the SqlServer data storage mode later (Data Migration)

The fact that you can manage the ScrewTurn Wiki using Microsoft WebMatrix is simply brilliant. The ease of use and ability to be able to publish the Wiki is simply useful. You can pretty much configure your hosting details if you wanted to host something on the internet and keep pushing your changes.

Now for Plugins, quite a lot of them seem to be available. There are vast number of navigational, text editing and data provider plugins. In addition to this you can customise different portions of the Wiki using your own providers , this seems like one of those things that was given a great deal of thought. See Custom Providers

I guess I am very impressed by what the Wiki offers, but looking at the features I am actually wondering if a product which was a Wiki is evolving into a CMS? Not sure, cant say I am bothered either, the only reason I raised that concern is the Wiki as is, is pretty simplistic and this is what appealed to me, building too much into could make it bulky and complex. I am just a developer so I cant give an accurate view of what users of the Wiki would want. On the bright side there are some really new features that are coming and that can be leveraged. V4 CTP offers native Azure support which should be good if you wanted to use Cloud based services I guess. See Roadmap for more details

Acceptance Testing

After playing around with Cucumber/ Cuke4Nuke and Specflow.. turns out cucumber is the winner for me.. Cuke4Nuke took me a while to get going and seems considerably slow and is behind cucumber by some distance..

Specflow is alright however the idea of using attributes to match my step definitions is what i didn't like.. integration with VS and being able to use the NUnit test runner are clear winners.. the entry barrier to this is pretty much minimal.

Well as for Cucumber/ Ruby / WATIR, the idea of using RubyMine to write my tests and debug them in the same doesn't make me miss VS integration and debugging.. I don't think i particularly miss writing my tests in different languages.. well i never do so why bother… The choice of gems available for Ruby and dynamic nature of ruby is something that makes the effort rewarding .. Build integration using a Rake runner is easy not much effort either..One other reason is may be because i use this at work .. there is yet one more to be looked at which is the WebDriver API for Selenium 2.0. http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-webdriver.html ..

I took some time to play around with these since I don’t like skimming through the surface ..

Google Chrome

Now as is all over the news i went about downloading the browser to get a feel of it. The download of the click once installer was about 474 KB so how big is that :) really neat start, then the download of the installer and install takes about 1 minute (4 MB line) and in another minute it imports all settings from IE. Now that was really impressive , two and half minutes all set and up and running.

Features that clearly stand out are the Search history, Dynamic Tabs and the simplicity of book marking pages, there is more but these make be happy already :).

A useful thing is the Search your history box, I have wished for something like this for ages and its nice to see this feature. Hope Google does this for favourites as well.. I having accumulating favourites for the last seven years and i some times wish i could search through surely useful to me :)

The UI is definitely better than the heavy IE7, tabs are not new in a browser these days just checkout the dynamic tabs feature in Google Chrome, it is definitely cool , drag the tab out and see how it works

Bookmarking is easier and the download feature is different to other browsers.

Seems like Google has just started , I am already thinking of using this browser , but i am not sure about any bottle necks .. gotta wait and see

I am quite happy with what the beta offers,  if Google manages to hold off IE , I bet we could see this being used more widely..

If you want to download go to http://tools.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB