Re: C#, .NET, and Unit Testing

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 15 May 2010 19:40:22 -0400
Message-ID:
<4bef30e5$0$284$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>
On 14-05-2010 21:52, Mike Schilling wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

On 13-05-2010 23:13, Mike Schilling wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

If it is a combined build and one does not need more
functionality than what it has, then I am sure it
is handy.


Yes. Our build amounted to:

1. Compile the Java classes (and build jars, etc.)
2. Convert the Java to C#
3. Compile the C# into DLLs and EXEs

Being able to do all 3 in ANT (the second was acomplished by running
a Java program, which ANT is also quite good at) was, indeed, handly.


How do you do the conversion?


I wrote a Java program to do it, because, at the time, all the publicly
available ones that claimed to do it were crap, especially Microsoft's JLCA.
The syntax conversion was straightforward, since C# 1.1 and Java 1.4 were,
roughly speaking, the same language with slight variants in syntax. (They
have to some extent grown apart, but those were the current versions when I
did this work.) The procedure was, roughly,

1. Use ANTLR to compile a Java source file into an AST
2. Walk the AST creating a tree of objects corresponding to language
features: classes, methods, various kinds of statement, various kinds of
expression, etc.
3. Transform this object graph as necessary for places where C# and Java
differ: e.g., make the hidden "outer this" parameter to an inner class
constructor explicit. At the same time, detect untranslatable code, e.g. a
return from a finally block.
4. Serialize the transformed graph into C#. This includes mapping JDK
classes and members into their .NET equivalents, e.g. org.w3c.dom.Element
into System.Xml.XmlElement, and of course, detecting classes and methods did
not (yet) have a .NET equivalent.

A necessary part of this is translating JUnit tests into NUnit tests, so you
have immediate confirmation that nothing got broken along the way. Which is
why it was so handy that every step from Java compilation through running
both sets of tests could be done by the same ANT script.


Very interesting.

If you ever decide to open source the tool, then please announce it.

Arne

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