CI/CD Scaling for Multiple Projects

While building the Jenkinsfile.groovy for a single project is straightforward, we want to share the logic across multiple C# projects.

I won’t go into the details as I did with my other posts about the process I went through. I moved the logic for Jenkinsfile.groovy into a Jenkins shared library, which is publicly available at Jenkins Library Sample.

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CI/CD Slack Notifications

You may not currently be using Slack for communication. Still, it is worth considering if you are working in a group (even for school projects) and aren’t using an alternative (beyond email). You can set up a Slack workspace for free and configure it for notifications.

I have a workspace set up for myself that I use with my family for sending lots of random stuff, but I also use it to test integrations I can then apply elsewhere.

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CI/CD Static Security Scanning

The following is inspired by the article from Kris the Coding Unicorn. This is not meant to be a comprehensive suite of tests but a start.

The following steps use the open-source Security Code Scan project, which publishes a tool to NuGet.

Unfortunately, Jenkins doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for visualizing security scans, so the output file is stored as an artifact of the job.

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CI/CD Code Coverage

Code coverage measures how much of the code is covered when running tests. This is a useful indicator of how effective tests are. One of the features we want to add is to set a minimum bar for testing to increase the quality of our components.

Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition doesn’t automatically include code coverage features out of the box. There are some things we can do to expose it in Jenkins during our build processes, validate the results, and possibly fail the build based on it. Within Visual Studio itself, you can install Fine Code Coverage from the Visual Studio Marketplace or consider tools such as NCrunch.

Adding additional steps to Jenkins won’t take long to get code coverage data and expose it on the Jenkins build page.

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CI/CD Revisions!

I have been relying on my previous efforts over five years ago that initially set out our C# builds in Jenkins. However, my next topic, code coverage, was new territory for me.

In the process of working through code coverage, I had the opportunity to discover opportunities to clean up the existing build scripts set out in the previous articles so far.

This article will cover the revisions I’ve made. However, I’ll also update the previous articles that will jump immediately to the result.

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CI/CD Publishing NuGet Packages

Initially, when building C# projects, I would have multiple solutions directly referencing the projects to be built. Sometimes, the solutions would have an extraordinary number of projects in them, so I could update them all in parallel.

However, this isn’t an ideal scenario as it makes it easy to blend code and develop tighter dependencies between modules that make future software development harder. By decomposing projects into smaller, more discrete and manageable components, we can increase the rigour around changes we make and have greater confidence in the code quality.

The use of NuGet to store versions of my packages means the applications I build can be small and lean and can work with already-defined mechanisms for publishing and retrieving packages.

I don’t want to publish my personal NuGet packages to a public repository (at least not without developing some confidence in the process first). So I have set up a Sonatype Nexus Repository to host NuGet packages.

I’ll go through the steps for configuring the Nexus Repository, Jenkins, and Visual Studio projects.

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CI/CD Building a C# Project in Jenkins

The goal for this stage of development is to get our C# project listed in Jenkins and building. The next iteration will be adding testing.

This step follows the work from CI/CD Scanning GitHub for Repositories from Jenkins, where Jenkins is set up to scan for projects, but it now needs the files required to build.

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CI/CD Visual Studio Project Layout

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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Arithmetic Coding

I have updated my github project with support for arithmetic coding.  It uses the algorithm provided by Malte Clasen and Eric Bodden.  It is an integer based encoder (32 bit unsigned).

I have made some changes to the original implementation to separate the statistical models more fully from the coder.  This allows substituting models on a per symbol basis.

An example of this behavior is provided in the ArithmeticStream class (paralleling the compression classes in System.IO.Compression).  This class uses two models: a zero order model and a new symbol model.  The former is only initialized with two symbols (stream terminator and new character).  The latter is initialized with all characters.

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