A stupid Team City build error

I've finally got Team City to run on Azure with the built-in database. But I was having terrible trouble getting my unit tests (MSTest) to run.

The error: 'Could not load file or assembly Autofac ...'

Every thing looked fine. Local build / test worked like a dream. NuGet packages loaded. CI build log showed Autofac was nu-get downloaded, and build success... I even fell back to RDP to build-box and run tests; again, success.

So what was the problem?

I used a simple short-hand to tell team city where the test assembly was: src/core.tests/**/*.tests.dll. This was (unexpected, by me at least) picking up both

1. src/core.tests/bin/debug/core.tests.dll AND
2. src/core.tests/obj/Debug/core.tests.dll

Fixing it

The fix is simple, just use a more exact setting in Team City src/core.tests/bin/Debug/*.tests.dll

Resolving a content item url in Orchard

Recently I needed to create a link to edit a content item in Orchard. Orchard uses a url like http://mysite/Home/Admin/Contents/Edit/123, where the id corresponds to the content item id.

My first thought was to hand-craft the url, replacing the content id as needed. But I found a better way: use the item's meta-data. Firstly inject the orchard IContentManager as usual, then call IContentManager.GetItemMetadata() The returned ContentItemMetadata contains MVC route's, for my particular case, EditorRouteValues had all the data I needed.

In my exploration of Orchard, I am continually finding myself having to dive into the code to work out how to do things. So here is 'how' I finally stumbled on the meta data solution.

Firstly I knew the Content Control Wrapper performed some 'magic' which added a link to a content item's edit.
Alas so-far I have no special trick for getting from a feature to the code that implements it. But eventually I found Orchard.Core/Contents/ControlWrapper.cs which implements the feature as a IShapeTableProvider. In here we see Content is wrapped with a Content_ControlWrapper shape.

Since nothing particularly enlightening is happening, I went to the view for the shape: Orchard.Core/Views/Content.ControlWrapper.cshtml. In the view the Html.ItemEditLinkWithReturnUrl() caught my eye.

This ItemEditLinkWithReturnUrl() is an extension, tracked down to Orchard.Framework/Mvc/Html/ContentItemExtensions.cs

Navigating to find the core ItemEditLink helper, bingo, I found how the content item meta-data is used for route values.