What’s that? You hadn’t heard? NCover is on a rapid release cycle, and v4.1 is hot out of the oven. The team has been hard at work refining the product that has garnered so much praise this past summer. NCover 4 was a revolutionary update to the code coverage arena, and 4.1 brings refinements that will make it even easier to roll out code coverage to your enterprise.
Floating on air…
NCover now supports floating licenses. One of the most requested features in the history of the product has been to allow floating licenses for use on multiple machines. With the advent of Code Central, NCover now has the perfect license manager located right within your environment. Code Central already had built-in license management to manage Collectors and Desktops, but now floating licenses means that you can check out a license from the Code Central server and then check it back in to the server for use on another machine. The benefits are flexibility, scalability, and a removal of the barrier to making NCover available across all development and testing machines in your enterprise. Please contact our sales team for more information about purchasing floating licenses.
NCover reporting for duty…
For your email and artifact enjoyment NCover 4.1 can produce a self-contained HTML report for any completed execution. This report details the trend of coverage for the prior 25 executions and shows an assembly level overview of the coverage breakdown. When generated from Code Central this report has live hyperlinks directed back to the details of the report within the Code Central GUI. The coverage summary report is generated from the NCover command line and is ideal for embedding in your build process.
Snapshots from edge…
With the rise of QA coverage zones in the release cycle, many coverage runs for software can last an extended number of hours or days. NCover 4.1 has a snapshot tool that captures an incremental picture of the coverage accomplished so far within an execution. This often requested feature gives incremental insight into those long coverage runs most common to QA environments. The snapshot functionality is available via the GUI and from the NCover command line. Use stand alone within the GUI or use in conjunction with the coverage summary report for incremental updates on testing progress.
Windows 8 my homework….
Rumor has it that Microsoft has hit the street with some brand new toys. Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 are now supported by NCover 4.1. Dive in and enjoy the new Metro GUI and while you’re at it get some VS2012 on the side. The Visual Studio plugin for NCover now works in Visual Studio versions 2008, 2010, and 2012.
Code Central forever alone…
In response to requests to simplify the implementation of Code Central on build servers, we have updated Code Central to be a full-fledged profiling environment. Code Central no longer requires a local copy of Collector to perform the profiling tasks. By making this change we have simplified both the licensing for Code Central and the setup. All 3 components of NCover now share default service names, ports, and command line syntax. One of our most requested updates to Code Central, it can now stand alone. Code Central still retains all the project sharing features it was born to provide. In addition the Auto-configure capability for detecting locally running processes to cover is now available in Code Central.
Filters with a little flash…
It turns out that with all the great compliments about the new NCover UI, we actually had one very consistent request. In this case, it was a clear consensus that the application of post-coverage filters was not obvious enough to the user. We’ve remedied that situation by add a highly visible badge showing the active filter in the dataview header. Because the filter settings can be preserved with bookmarks and shared links, this badge will reappear whenever a link is active which applies a filter. The application and removal of a filter remains unchanged, but this mechanism will definitely improve visibility.
More 2 tell….
There are literally dozens of additional features and fixes in the 4.1 release of NCover. Stay tuned for more detail on these features and many more:
- Re-licensing
- Manual static analysis command
- Re-base paths for source
- Resizable grid columns
- Assembly version detail
- Faster profiling
- Data synchronization
- Pre-coverage filter override
- NCover Explorer Enhancements