CI/CD Visual Studio Project Layout

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As described in https://www.oneoddsock.com/2022/04/02/personal-ci-cd/, the goal of setting up the CI/CD automation is to:

  • Break up my more monolithic solutions into much smaller, more consumable components
  • Automate testing of my code
  • Improve potential for code sharing with others
  • Greater visibility of code/test status through reporting

To facilitate this, I’ll structure my Visual Studio solutions in GitHub so Jenkins can access them and run builds and tests.

The sample project is published on GitHub for reference at: https://github.com/FineRedMist/jenkins-project-sample-dotnet

For reference, I’m using Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition. I’m configuring the projects to use .NET 6.0.

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Personal CI/CD

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I have a number of personal projects with code scattered about, where if I want to include code from one project into another I generally either need to copy code or find more sophisticated ways to share.

After going through interviewing coop student candidates and seeing their projects and GitHub repositories (when provided) I realized that documenting the process and demonstrating the value you can get out of it would be substantial.

The motivation for me is to take my projects to a higher level of rigour and improve reuse. Furthermore, I want to automate builds, validation by content tests, notifications, etc.

I do use GitHub for storing my projects which are primarily in C# but I want to amp up my setup to another level. The feature I want are:

  1. Get my projects from GitHub
  2. Build them
  3. Run tests on them
  4. Post main branch builds to a NuGet repository
  5. Post main branch symbols to a symbol server
  6. Generate notifications to Slack (I have my own setup for the family) about build status.

I already have a machine I use locally for service-related work. Switching to Linux would be non-trivial due to some of the services being run.

So the following setup will be using Windows, but I don’t think it will be entirely dissimilar to Linux.

The software I’m looking at using for all of these are:

Anything else that comes up during setup will be documented along the way.

Unreal Engine & Localization

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The Unreal Engine has some rather nifty functionality for dealing with localization. We have also made numerous modifications to facilitate our workflow, but I’ll stick to what is in vanilla Unreal (this is based on 4.25).

There are three different string types to use within Unreal:

  • FString: These are traditional strings most people are used to. When creating a new string it will allocate memory to store the data. Equality comparisons need to check the actual string data.
  • FName: When you create a name, it is stored in a table in memory permanently (there is no clean up of unused names). Two FNames with the same value point to the same index, which makes equality comparisons very fast: they just compare indices. But the memory usage can grow without bound.
  • FText: These are localized strings that go through a process of being gathered, translated, and having their values stored in a separate file called a locres file. When evaluating an FText, there is a lookup for the actual value to use.

Epic provides a tokenization system using curly braces, { and }, where you can provide parameters (either positional or named) for an FText format string.

However, we added another one using square brackets, [ & ], where we would take the token within and look up the value as an FName in various tables that were provided to look up information.

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We Got Schooled

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Welcome to Ontario, where we are in lock down again.

It is really unfortunate we are in this situation again. We didn’t need to be. We could have been substantially more rigorous about how we approached testing for COVID, constraining vectors of transmission, and minimizing spread of the virus.

This may sound odd, but sadly Ford’s Ontario government’s focus on the economy has missed extraordinary opportunities that existed. We could have done so much more for the economy AND constrained the spread of COVID.

What is interesting is these opportunities are STILL present. We can still implement these now, just without the same impact it would have had six months ago in the summer.

The first thing to note is now we have to up our game: COVID is mutating given the number of people infected and how we are fighting it. We need to be prepared for this by minimizing spread as much as possible to reduce opportunities to mutate and overcome our efforts to immunize.

First are all the notes we made in https://www.oneoddsock.com/2020/08/10/covid-19-and-the-ontario-education-guidelines/.

Since I posted this we have learned a lot about how effective school is at present. It is clear that it isn’t working effectively.

Students don’t reliably have effective spaces or resources for learning that school provides. So when learning remotely (as high school students are obligated to 3/4 of the time and now all students have to do ALL of the time), accommodations are needed to make education effective.

The following are additional recommendations:

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Minimum Wage & COVID

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I find it extremely disappointing that the frontline workers that have to deal with the substantially greater risk of contracting COVID are in many cases relying on minimum wage.

If they really are as valuable as we are saying (and I think they are), we should increase the minimum wage to reflect that.

I fully agree with paid sick leave, particularly for COVID to avoid further infections, but there is one more detail I would add to minimum wage requirements: Part-time workers should have a HIGHER minimum wage. The reason being is they are not working the full 40 hours per week and are substantially more likely to have multiple jobs to support themselves and their family. Working multiple jobs increases the likelihood of spreading COVID as it crosses (theoretical) bubbles. Increasing the minimum wage for part-time would ideally drive more employers to provide full-time work instead and reduce the number of jobs that a person has to maintain to support themselves and their family.

“Use Your Own Words”

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I didn’t expect how much this hurt.

You can take some text and apply some function to it, say “summarize” or “paraphrase” and you have an idea of what to do.

What do you do when you are asked to take some text and “express it in your own words”? I don’t know what this means. Let me turn it around to give you an example. Let’s say given some text A I come up with text B that is “in my own words”. How do you test that? How different does B have to be from A? How similar do they have to be to ensure B reflects A in some way? If you assign this task to multiple people, you not only expect different results, you *want* different results as if it is unheard of to have people apply the same poorly defined “in your own words” function to text A.

As to the hurt? I have a rather intense case of imposter syndrome. I didn’t grow up in an environment that was particularly interested in what I had to say. Everyone else was far more interested in talking about what was on their minds than being interested in what I had to contribute. So I learned to shut up. I don’t have my own words.

Extra Notes:

The procedure I’m approaching when I encounter this now is to review the material, close it so I’m not referring to it, then write my thoughts on it. Then compare to determine if I’m missing relevant details.

However, it still feels like there is a fundamental issue when you think about making information concise but unique; the concise configurations one can have of words about a topic that conveys information minimizes words increasing the likelihood of non-uniqueness amongst others going through the same operation.

Making Tracks

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I briefly had the Canada COVID-19 tracking application installed, but I was extremely disappointed. It required both Bluetooth and GPS to run which means that if either were off for power saving then it wouldn’t operate. The exchange of codes should not require GPS at all. Furthermore it calls into question about the application not tracking location and maintaining personal privacy by demanding GPS to be enabled.

I honestly would have hoped for more from this functionality. There are a couple of features that would have stood out as compelling to keep it installed and available more often:

  • An API that other applications can use to determine how busy potential destinations are, the amount of interest in it (from other viewers, anonymous), and possibly recommendations for less busy places of a similar kind and distance.
  • Getting paid in some minor way, a credit, or tax break for running the application.

It should also reduce the barrier for tracking and reporting COVID. It could provide a QR code for testing facilities so your phone can directly receive notification of test results and propagate them, or scan a QR code from the test from the screen to do the same so there isn’t the likelihood of manually entering data or griefing with manually entering false information.

Digitizing Physical Transactions

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Retail sale has transformed to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Plastic shielding, gloves, masks, and tap to pay all help reduce the spread of COVID-19.

However we are still printing out and handing over paper receipts.

Instead we can make receipts contact-less. Transactions can be stored as a digital receipt instead with a QR code either containing the data or containing a link that goes to a site to get the data. Phones can scan the QR code. People who have a membership could receive their receipts as they typically scan their membership (though they may want their receipt as a QR code as well for software to manage).

There are already standards for the specification of digital receipts http://xml.coverpages.org/dridtd-19990119.html and http://xml.coverpages.org/ARTS-IXRetail-DigitalReceiptXML-Schema.html.

Finally digital receipts could make it substantially easier to track expenses and claim them for companies and taxes.

COVID-19 and the Ontario Education Guidelines

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COVID-19 is a hard problem. It is larger than building a Canadarm, larger than a hydroelectric dam at Niagara Falls, and larger than the tallest freestanding structure for 32 years. COVID-19 is a problem that requires engagement by everyone, every step of the way. Lives have been lost. Now is the time to hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

Let’s be conservative.

On June 19th, 2020, the Ontario government published a set of guidelines for re-opening schools in September, which was based on stringent measures of increased sanitation, hygiene, and social distancing. On July 30th, 2020, a new and far less strict plan was published. The current plan for Ontario’s schools to return to full class size is based on the premise that children are not significant contributors to spreading COVID-19. Current scientific data don’t support this claim.

The impact of a COVID-19 resurgence and an ensuing lockdown would be substantially worse than initiating preventative measures. Preventative measures are an investment in enabling Ontario to operate safely (see “Impact of COVID-19 on Ontario’s Economy” below).

When children return to school in September, we need to minimize the spread of COVID-19 and to maximize the well-being of families and their ability to support themselves. Investing in education now by reducing class sizes to prevent a resurgence of COVID-19 would avoid a catastrophic impact on our health care and economy due to returning to a state of lockdown. As of July 30th, Ontario’s reported case rate for COVID-19 has remained steady at under 200 per day; we are not yet even near zero. 

Current understanding of COVID-19 epidemiology

The most significant measure for reducing the spread of COVID-19 is to minimize contact between people to reduce the spread of infection. While Remdesivir is progress for treatment, its partial reduction of recovery time and mortality is further inhibited by availability. In the light of limited treatment, the uncertainty of immunity to COVID-19, and the unavailability of a vaccine, the best approach to contain the disease is to minimize its spread.

Recent studies highlight the following aspects of COVID-19 transmission necessary to consider when re-opening schools:

  • Asymptomatic adult carriers of COVID-19 have the same virus load as symptomatic carriers, suggesting asymptomatic carriers can be efficient transmitters.
  • There are other debilitating outcomes from COVID-19 other than death ranging from a prolonged recovery period to multiple organ failure that have a profound impact on income, employment, long term disability, parenting, and support from the government.
  • Children are less likely to suffer from COVID-19 than adults and show milder symptoms, potentially allowing infections to spread unnoticed.
  • Young symptomatic children (less than five years old) have at least as high or even 10-100 times higher viral load in their upper respiratory tracts as symptomatic adults. These data alert that symptomatic children may be more effective carriers and transmitters.
  • In children, SARS-CoV-2 persists in faecal samples even after clearing from the respiratory tract, which has the potential to transmit the virus (especially in kindergarten) even after negative tests.
  • Antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can fade quickly in both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases, in which case re-infection remains an open question.

It is premature at best to claim that schools aren’t a significant transmission route for COVID-19. Until we have substantial evidence to support these claims, we cannot risk people’s livelihoods and lives on a hope.

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