Download the new version here.
All’s well that ends well, but it wasn’t always that way.
Since releasing NCover v3.2.4 we’ve had a few customers reporting a strange condition where the Treeview control was missing from NCover Explorer and sometimes the trend graph would not render. It was driving me nuts. We tried to reproduce it in the operating system that the customer was using with no luck. Then one day a customer sent a support ticket stating NCover worked fine until they reinstalled the operating system on the machine (XP SP3).
Scratching my head, I installed a brand new copy of XP SP3 and turned off “protect my machine”. I then installed .Net 3.5 NON SP1 and poof, NCover was broken.
I thought to myself, ‘Cool! Somebody must have updated the build machine to SP1 and that is why it compiled’. This was not the case. The build server was .NET 3.5. I thought, ‘Cool, I will just go load up Visual Studio 2008 (non sp1 and no hot fixes) and compile and it should break’. Nope, this did not happen either. I kept thinking I would outsmart this issue and that I must have messed up a check-in or a merge, so I turned on break on all errors, and nothing broke.
At this point I fired up one of my favorite tools, Beyond Compare. I pulled down the v3.1.4 and v3.2.4 branches and ran a diff on both branches. I found this change in the code where one of our developers tried to do the right thing by using a reusable control, a HeaderedContentControl. He moved the style into a resource file and set everything up the way you would expect a good programmer to do. I had a hunch; I asked myself, ‘What would happen if I remove the style on the control?’ Not really expecting anything to happen because WPF is not HTML, I was amazed to see that the problem went away, the Treeview just showed up out of nowhere.
I had to bring the programmer over to bust his chops for doing the right thing. Who would think that a style would work fine in SP1 but not in the original release of .Net 3.5? After all that research I ended up putting all the code back where it was, making three copies of the style code just to make sure NCover Explorer would work with .Net 3.5 and .Net 3.5 SP1.
Is there a point to all of this? Yes there is: Make sure Vista is not SP2. Since it already contains a newer version of .NET 3.5 SP1 so you will never find the issue. The other point is that even though a service pack is not expected to change the behavior of your application, never assume it won’t.
P.S. the complete release notes can be read here.