Missing reports in CruiseControl.NET

My team experienced a spell of build failures last week due to broken unit tests. It wasn't a big deal, broken tests happen from time to time, the breaker simply fixes them and life goes on. However, something strange happened when we looked at the build report to see what failed.

The report showed that the NUnit process had exited with an error code, but the unit test summary claimed that no tests had been run.

I logged in to the build server and checked out the build log. The unit test results were there, and I was able to search the log to find which ones failed, but obviously nobody wants to log in to the build server and search through a text file whenever a unit test breaks. On closer inspection, I realized that all of the XML data for the test results were wrapped in a CDATA section. One developer pointed out that this was likely caused by strange characters in the test results, and the documentation for the file merge task confirmed the possibility. However, my team has amassed about 2,500 unit tests, so finding the offending character in approximately 10,000 lines of test results would have been difficult to say the least.

After some digging, I found out that CruiseControl.NET logs a debug message when a file cannot be merged because it contains invalid XML. I opened up the log (ccnet.log by default) and a quick search for output is not valid XML revealed the exact line number in the test results that caused the file merge task to fail. Now we are happily integrating continuously once again.