So yesterday I pushed some code over to GitHub, then went off to work on a different project. A few seconds later I got an email from AppVeyor telling me that my CI build worker was reporting a failure. I was surprised as just ahead of the push I had tests all green in local.
Turned out failure was on an equality assertion between two date values:
As you can see the mismatch was precisely two hours. That always rings a Time Zone alarm bell in my head. I was under the assumption that since my time zone was correctly set in my account settings, the workers would pick it up. Well as it turns out, that is not the case as that setting is only used for notifications and NuGet feeds. The AppVeyor app worker runs on UTC by default.
Solution was straightforward. I edited the appveyor.yml file and instructed
the worker to launch tzutil and set the desired time zone immediately, before
anything else is executed:
And that was it. Remember, you can use tzutil /l on your local box to get
a list of the available timezones.
Another minor (and temporary) issue I have with AppVeyor is that they do not officially support C# 7.0 yet. Try using an inline temporary variable in your code. Tests will be green in local and happily fail on AppVeyor, as the VM runs MSBuild 14. The Visual Studio 2017 RC image is in beta and not available in the Environment settings unless you explictly ask for it here. They are quick to reply though and then, not without some more fiddling (see the post at the top of the thread), you can get C# 7.0 features to run seamlessly in the VM.
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