While I still use VisualStudio 2005 Team System for most of my development, I want to make sure that cfix works properly with VisualStudio 2008 as well.
To test that, I recently started a Windows 2003 Server VM, installed VCExpress 2008 and cfix and attempted to run an example project in the VC debugger. As long as no assertions fired, everything seemed fine. I then altered the example’s source code so that one of the assertion would fail, ran it in the debugger – and waited.
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When used in conjunction with the VisualStudio 2008 debugger, cfix may hang indefinitely as soon as an assertion fails. The reason for this behavior is a Symbol Server-caused deadlock between the debugger and cfix. I am going to discuss the details of this deadlock in a separate post.
Until a new version of cfix is available, you can work around this problem as follows: Go to the cfix installation directory and rename or delete symsrv.
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cfix 1.0 had been licensed under the GNU General Public License. One of the characteristics of the GPL is that it disallows proprietary binaries to be linked against GPL-licensed binaries.
In the context of cfix, linking is quite a concern – after all, every test-DLL has to be linked against cfix.dll. As cfix.dll is GPL-licensed, this means that it would be illegal to redistribute the test-DLL, along with the cfix test runner, commercially.
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cfix 1.1 introduces a number of new features. The most important among these is the additional ability to write kernel mode unit tests, i.e. unit tests that are run in kernel mode. Needless to say, cfix 1.1 still supports user mode unit tests.
All contemporary unit testing frameworks focus on unit testing in user mode. Certainly, the vast majority of testing code can be assumed to be targeting user mode, so this does not come at a surprise.
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Despite the fact that mainstream support for Windows 2000 has ended in 2005 and the system is well on its way to retirement, Windows 2000 is still in wide use today. As such, it remains being an important target platform for many software packages.
The fact that cfix has not provided support for Windows 2000 was thus unfortunate – after all, if Windows 2000 is among the target platforms of your software, you should be able to run your tests on this platform.
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About one month after having released the first release candidate, cfix has now reached version 1.0.0 final.
The differences between RC1 and the final version are minor. A small number of bugs have emerged during the past weeks, most of which related to output and statistics tracking. Those bugs have been fixed in 1.0.0 final. Despite these fixes, there are no functional differences between the two releases.
The new release can be found on the Sourceforge Download page.
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I am happy to announce that the unit testing framework cfix I have developed over the past weeks and months is now available on Sourceforge as a first release candidate. It is licensed under the GPL, both binaries and source code are available.
Background cfix is a framework for authoring and running xUnit-like testcases written in C or C++. The aim of the tool is to provide a development experience very similar to frameworks such as JUnit or NUnit.
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Debugging a Debugger Deadlock