tea time with meowkins

Visual Studio Unit Test Old Assembly Errors

Today I was having some trouble with visual studio unit tests.  First, I kept on getting a "could not load assembly" error.  The problem here was difficult to track because of the way assemblies are loaded.  The test project references the assembly as another project, and the new assembly was built correctly, and located right in the debug folder.  However, the assembly was also installed to the GAC, and the tests were trying to load the old assembly in the GAC, and failing.  I installed the new assembly to the GAC, and everything worked fine.

The second problem was that I kept on getting a System.MissingFieldException.  I thought it was the same problem (and it probably was, in a way), so double checked that I installed the new assembly to the GAC before running the test.  However, the exception kept coming up, and I didn't understand why.  Then, I hit debug on the test so that I could maybe get some more information, and suddenly the test worked.  I'm not really sure why this happens, but if you get tripped up on the assembly not refreshing, even after you reinstall it, then try using the debug mode.

VSTS 2008 Get Specific Version Doesn't Overwrite Checked Out Files

Today I found out that visual studio team system 2008's get specific file doesn't work as I had expected.  I thought that get specific version with the two overwrite options checked would be equivalent to undoing the pending changes on the file and then checking it out again.

Well unfortunately it doesn't work that way. This will fix any files that you have done an overwrite to but didn't check out (checkbox #1), but it wouldn't overwrite any of the checked out files I had - what I thought checkbox #2 meant.  So if you're having any weird differences, or your files don't seem to be updating, check on this problem.

Sorting SharePoint SPWebCollection

Here is some code to sort a collection of sites by title.

Create a custom IComparer for sites:

public class SPListItemComparer : IComparer
{

    #region IComparer Members

    public int Compare(object x, object y)
    {
        if (!(x is SPListItem) || !(y is SPListItem))
            throw new ArgumentException("Cannot compare non-SPListItem objects using SPListItemComparer");
        return string.Compare(((SPListItem)x).Name, ((SPListItem)y).Name);
    }

    #endregion
}

Then, put the sites into a sortable collection such as ArrayList and call the collection's Sort method using your custom IComparer.

SPWebCollection collWebsite = oSiteCollection.AllWebs;
ArrayList sortedWebs = new ArrayList(collWebsite.Count);
foreach (SPWeb oWebsite in collWebsite)
{
    sortedWebs.Add(oWebsite);
}
sortedWebs.Sort(new ArrowUtils.SPWebSortComparer());