Archive for June, 2004

Integrating Source Safe and Mantis

Wednesday, June 16th, 2004 | Development | No Comments

On the never-ending quest for improved development support I have managed to tie Microsoft Visual Source Safe together with the open source bug tracking system, Mantis, so that checkin comments will be reflected in bugnotes in the bug tracking system.

This helps make it easier for developers to see what changes influenced a certain bug, what it took to fix it and so on and so forth, all in all a pretty nifty tool. The first part of the road was etched in clear marble, I’d have to use the VSS 6.0 Automation library using COM Interop from .NET (of course I’m implementing this in C#). Fetching version info is fairly trivial, actually, so kudos to whomever implemented the automation model.

Of course as any developer reading this has come to understand, things just aren’t going to be this easy all the way. So how do we make sure this automation code is triggered when we have a checkin? Well, we make a SourceSafe add-in, right? Sure, if I want to force all developers using it to use the SourceSafe Client rather than do the source control work directly from Visual Studio.NET. So away goes the idea of a SourceSafe add-in. Right, well, a VS.NET add-in must be just what the doctor ordered, right? Well, this is where I, much to my disappointment, wasn’t able to find anyplace inside the VS.NET automation model that allows you to hook up to source control events (please correct me if I am wrong).

So what is a desperate developer trying to please people by integrating their systems to do? Well, how about writing a Windows Service running the integration every 30 minutes, it’s not as if the checkins are that critical to see in real time anyway, is it? An hour later and the entire system is nicely converted to a Windows Service, complete with application configuration bindings that allows you to configure the frequency the integration is run, the MySQL server hosting the mantis tables, the source safe server and user credentials for the same. And as the nice guy I am, here is all the lovely source code for it:

The Service
The Automaton Library

At some point of time I will probably brush this thing up a bit and make sure that it adheres all the technical details of Mantis, and hey, I might even submit it to the Mantis project, although they probably won’t be overly thrilled with seeing Windows-specific code. They are like that them pesky open source people. :o)

Hope you find some use for it. Feel free to drop a line.

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A DIME for your Country – the continued story

Friday, June 11th, 2004 | .NET, Development | No Comments

I have previously discussed Microsoft’s DIME implementation in their Web Service Enhancements 1.0 library for .NET. Namely the part where they manage to break any and all support for non-ASCII SOAP transfers. It seems as if they’ve rectified this grivious mistake in version 2.0 of WSE, so now we can have international messages, yay!

Of course we have to rebind our solutions, re-test and all, but hey, what don’t we do to get them internation characters delivered to our doorstep?

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