A Confused Programmer's Blog

If you stumbled onto this article, it is safe to assume that you know what REST Assured is. REST Assured is built on top of Apache HTTP library and it adds more perks for those who are specifically interested in interacting with REST services. As such, it provides services, most of which are convenient, but sometimes they are deeply confusing when the things are not working out as REST Assured assumes they should. The probability of things going wrong grows  [ Read More ]

Since I upgraded my Windows 8 to Windows 10, I got a side effect of error 623 (“System could not find the phone book entry for this connection”) popping up on each logon. Search in the Internet for solution did not yield useful results for my condition, so, for a while, I resigned to live with this problem and closing this pesky popup every time I turn on my computer. I would like to share my fix, so maybe if  [ Read More ]

We are working on automated testing of virtual appliance. This appliance has a EULA which blocks all services from starting before accepted at first. There are separate ways to solve or workaround this obstacle: Edit OVF and MF files to erase the EULA section and to update the signature. Redirect console output and input to the SSH session and to accept it with SSH client. Use 3rd party products, like OvfTool which can deploy appliance from command line with EULA acceptance. Implement  [ Read More ]

OVF is a VMware virtual appliance format which allows you to deploy VMs with custom settings and state. This solution replaces stand alone installation packages and becomes increasingly popular. I had to create support for automatically deploying one of such OVFs. Actually, I managed to get my hands on OVA and converted it into OVF, but I am not sure if this fact has too much relevance to the story. However, when I tried to deploy this OVF using both  [ Read More ]

In my blog I am set on a mission to describe cases of severe code or environment dysfunction which wasn’t documented on forums and took me quite a while to figure out. The following case falls into the above category. I am working on integrating Jenkins as our CI environment and we use Perforce as source control. At first I have set up Windows node and utilized P4 plugin to manage the workspace and the update process. This went relatively  [ Read More ]

I rarely post about the issues I am experiencing in this blog. This is mostly because most of the solutions are already there in the web. So, what pushed me to publish this post, is extremely rare scenario, that as I suspect might not be covered somewhere else. In our testing automation framework we make extensive use of virtual machines. Most of control messages are passed using vSphere API (VIM API). To my dismay, I discovered that some of previously  [ Read More ]

As a part of one of the projects I am currently working on, I was required to set up a new Vmware vCenter server instance. Until recently, I has been installing vCenter manually from scratch on Windows server machines. This time I was advised to try a vCenter server appliance (vCSA). The deployment of the new vCenter server instance is indeed quicker and smoother, but the fact that the operating system is Linux presents several little less documented challenges. For  [ Read More ]

I run Windows7 x64 operating system and referencing some of the projects resulted in “BadImageFormatException: could not load file or assembly” error during the run-time. Microsoft has a knowledge base article explaining that the most likely cause for this error is platform incompatibility. This behavior will also occur if your application is compiled targeting the "AnyCPU" platform, and then is run an operating system whose platform differs than the assembly whose type you are trying to instantiate. For example, if  [ Read More ]

Recently I was assigned a task of writing automated tests for web based application. The testing framework that was chosen was Selenium v2.25. While this tool is quite powerful (for example, it will fail attempted interaction with element if this element is not accessible because it is hidden or currently blocked by another object), I ran into two issues. The first one is being slowness when it comes to retrieving data. I had a table consisting of ~100 cells. When  [ Read More ]

I ran into curious issue that took me a while to sort out. We are using WCF 3.5 for interconnection between modules. Some of the commands return AsyncResult in order to be executed concurrently. I needed to write a code that executes 11 concurrent actions using WCF. Strangely, last action hanged and never arrived to the recipient module. This looked like WCF (mis-)configuration issue, and indeed it was so. WCF asynchronous methods framework is a separate entity with complex logic  [ Read More ]