nant tips and tricks - part #2 Windows Shares and Visual Basic

Here are some more nant examples I've used in my projects.

Nant Map a Windows Share
These simple tasks will map a Windows network share as a local drive letter using the NET USE command
The properties in the examples are pretty self-explainitory. The ones of interest were defined as follows in my scenario where I was mounting the c: of the remote machine defined in the property named 'server':
<property name="deployMappedLetter" value="y:"/> <property name="deployRemotePath" value="\\${server}\c$"/> <target name="mapDelete" description="Delete the existing mapped Drive to DeployServer"> <if test="${directory::exists(deployMappedLetter)}"> <echo>Deleting existing Mapped Drive ${deployMappedLetter}</echo> <exec program="net" failonerror="false"> <arg line="use"/> <arg line="${deployMappedLetter}"/> <arg line="/Delete"/> <arg line="/y"/> </exec> </if> </target> <target name="mapRemoteDir" depends="mapDelete" description="Create a mapped Drive to DeployServer"> <exec program="net"> <arg line="use"/> <arg line="${deployMappedLetter}"/> <arg line="${deployRemotePath}"/> <arg line="${remotePass}"/> <arg line="/user:${remoteUser}"/> </exec> </target>
Nant reading the result code of an Installshield Install
When you run an installshield installer with silent mode, it outputs a text file. Sound practice says to read that file and ensure the installer did not fail. This reads the setup.log file from the path defined in deployLocalPath <loadfile file="${deployLocalPath}\setup.log" property="deploySetupLogContents" /> <property name="startPosition" value="${string::index-of(deploySetupLogContents,'ResultCode=') + 11}"/> <property name="totallength" value="${string::get-length(deploySetupLogContents)}"/> <property name="stringLength" value="${string::get-length(deploySetupLogContents) - int::parse(startPosition)}"/> <property name="deploySetupResultCode" value="${string::substring(deploySetupLogContents, int::parse(startPosition), int::parse(stringLength))}"/> <echo>Result Code is ${deploySetupResultCode}</echo> <if test="${int::parse(deploySetupResultCode) < 0}"> <fail message="Setup failed with Result Code ${deploySetupResultCode}" /> </if>
UPDATE: The above is pretty hack - now that I recognized you can simply use a regex task.Here's a simplier example that does the same thing and loads the Result code into setupResultCode
<loadfile file="${LocalPath}\setup.log" property="installerLog" /> <regex pattern="ResultCode=(?'setupResultCode'.+)" input="${installerLog}" /> <echo>Setup Result Code is ${setupResultCode}</echo> <if test="${int::parse(setupResultCode) < 0}"> <fail message="Setup failed with Result Code ${setupResultCode}" /> </if> Nant and visual basic scripts (vbs)
Sometimes doing this is easier with visual basic and if you don't have VisualStudio or can't code.. visual basic scripting is enough to access things like WMI so you can manipulate Windows machines. Visual Basic scripts are not intended to be console applications anymore.. so first problem is running them in a command line so output can be viewed and captured by nant. Solution.. run the script using cscript.exe. The following example calls the vbs script remoteprocUP.vbs and passes a few arguements to the vbs file
<exec program="cscript.exe" workingdir="."> <arg line="remoteprocUP.vbs"/> <arg line="${server}"/> <arg line="${remoteUser}"/> <arg line="${remotePass}"/> <arg line="upgrade"/> </exec> The second problem with visual basic scripts is getting some debugging or informational messages out to console so they can be seen or logged by nant. When using cscript.exe to launch the program, in the vbs file you can use WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(string) or WScript.Echo. Example:
WScript.StdOut.WriteLine("Testing Server Address: " & "http://" & myWebsite & myURL)
The last challenge is handling error codes from visual basic apps. Again, when using cscript, you can simply use WScript.Quit 0 to return 0 (success) or WScript.Quit 1 to return 1 (failure). nant will see the failure code and automatically stop your script.

Here is a complete example. nant calls a target who's overall job is wait until a website is online. It calls a visual basic script using cscript and relies on error codes to know if things failed or not.
<target name="waitForCleanServer" description="Checks and Waits for Clean Deploy Server"> <exec program="cscript.exe"> <arg line="checkserverHTTP.vbs"/> <arg line="${server}"/> <arg line="/iisstart.htm"/> </exec> </target>
And here is the visual basic script
' Script must be called from cscript.exe because of Wscript objects that write to console ' use is ' cscript.exe checkserverHTTP.vbs <serveraddress> <path> Dim ArgObj Dim strServer Set ArgObj = WScript.Arguments strServer = ArgObj(0) strURL = ArgObj(1) If PingSite( strServer, strURL ) Then WScript.Echo "Server " & strServer & " is up" WScript.Quit 0 Else WScript.Echo "Server " & strServer & " is down" WScript.Quit 1 End If Function PingSite( myWebsite, myURL ) 'based off code from http://www.robvanderwoude.com Dim intStatus, objHTTP, intCounter, intCounterMax IntCounter = 1 intStatus = 0 intCounterMax = 60 intSleep = 10000 WScript.StdOut.WriteLine("Testing Server Address: " & "http://" & myWebsite & myURL) Do Set objHTTP = CreateObject( "WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1" ) objHTTP.SetTimeouts 10000, 10000, 10000, 10000 objHTTP.Open "GET", "http://" & myWebsite & myURL, False objHTTP.SetRequestHeader "User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MyApp 1.0; Windows NT 5.1)" On Error Resume Next objHTTP.Send intStatus = objHTTP.Status ' check if page is retrieved or you get a 401 unauthorized. Shouldn't get a 401 unless the directory/page exists.. which should be good enough. And ' avoids the problems of web root having no anon access on appliances If intStatus = 200 or intStatus = 401 Then PingSite = True Exit Do Else WScript.StdOut.WriteLine("failure attempt " & intCounter & " Waiting " & (intSleep / 1000) & " Seconds") End If If intCounter <> intCounterMax Then Wscript.Sleep intSleep End If Set objHTTP = Nothing intStatus = 0 IntCounter = IntCounter + 1 Loop until intCounter = IntCounterMax + 1 If intCounter = intCounterMax Then PingSite = False End If End Function