altcover.fake

Contains options to run AltCover as part of dotnet test within a Fake build script.

Usage

Given specifications prepare, process and collect (part of the API), extend a dotnet test invocation with coverage collection

open AltCoverFake.DotNet.DotNet // extension method WithAltCoverOptions Fake.DotNet.DotNet.test (fun to' -> to'.WithAltCoverOptions prepare collect process) "dotnettest.fsproj"

See the Wiki page for full details

What's in the box?

APIs for integration into Fake build scripts -- what one might expect to see as a module Fake.DotNet.Testing.AltCover, just like the other Fake.DotNet.Testing.* modules, only built and maintained with the rest of the tool.

Why altcover?

As the name suggests, it's an alternative coverage approach. Rather than working by hooking the .net profiling API at run-time, it works by weaving the same sort of extra IL into the assemblies of interest ahead of execution. This means that it should work pretty much everywhere, whatever your platform, so long as the executing process has write access to the results file. You can even mix-and-match between platforms used to instrument and those under test.

In particular, while instrumenting .net core assemblies "just works" with this approach, it also supports Mono, as long as suitable .mdb (or .pdb, in recent versions) symbols are available. One major limitation here is that the .mdb format only stores the start location in the source of any code sequence point, and not the end; consequently any nicely coloured reports that take that information into account may show a bit strangely.

Why altcover? -- the back-story of why it was ever a thing

Back in 2010, the new .net version finally removed the deprecated profiling APIs that the free NCover 1.5.x series relied upon. The first version of AltCover was written to both fill a gap in functionality, and to give me an excuse for a ground-up F# project to work on. As such, it saw real production use for about a year and a half, until OpenCover reached a point where it could be used for .net4/x64 work (and I could find time to adapt everything downstream that consumed NCover format input).