Re: Obfuscation & unit testing

Hi Michael, 

> I appreciate the support problems with obfuscation, and I 
> guess I'm just going to have to live with them as it is 
> mostly not my call there.  I had already raised that issue 
> with management and agreed to lose on it :-)
> 
> I want to be able to run the unit tests with and without 
> obfuscation.  I am pretty leery of the idea of taking nicely 
> tested code and then going and futzing with it right before 
> packaging a release!  But if the unit test run is clean, it's 
> probably not more broken than what I wrote in the first place.
>
> What I envision is a TDD process without obfuscation most of 
> the time. 
> When an external release is made, the normal tests will be 
> run, the application dlls will be obfuscated and the tests 
> will be rerun to verify that there were no issues introduced 
> by obfuscation.  I then want to package those very same dlls 
> as the release items, so the release itself is tested.
 
Now that you mention it, that makes sense. I'd also want to have
a higher-level, acceptance-style test, which could be run on 
the shipping release.

This is actually a new argument for something I have talked
about before: don't do acceptance tests in NUnit.

> Our application is complicated by the fact that we have a 
> compact framework application which is 80% of the code and a 
> small desktop component that is the remainder, so we've got 
> two different platforms to target.

Off topic... keep an eye peeled for coming integration between
NUnit and NUnitLite for testing compact framework apps.
 
> It seems if I rearrange how we are handling strong naming 
> issues and set up the solution to deploy the application dlls 
> and test dlls to one folder I can obfuscate the application 
> dlls but not the test dlls and still have them linked and the 
> tests continue to have their highly descriptive names but the 
> stack traces show that they are testing the obfuscted dlls.

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought you could do that. 

If that works, it makes sense: no reason to obfuscate the
tests.

Charlie

> That all seemed to work fine.  The only potentially fatal 
> flaw I found is with the strong naming issue, something I 
> don't entirely understand in .net, particularly the 
> differences between reflection on the desktop and handheld.  
> The help & support from the Dotfuscator people seemed to have 
> a process for applying strong names after the fact, which I 
> can follow after I spend some time figuring out what's going on.
> 
> Anyway, that's what I've figured out so far.  Any thoughts, 
> advice & experience appreciated!
> 
> -Mikey Reppy
> [email protected]
> 
> 
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