After some experimenting it turns out to be really simple. All you need to do is implement the interface ITask. There are however a few more things to keep in mind.

Before I start, let me say that everything I learned about this comes from looking at the source of CruiseControl.Net and also peeking at the Twitter Publisher by Thomas Freudenberg.

Your assembly must have a name on the pattern ccnet.*.plugin.dll. The location of the dll must be the same as the ccnet server directory (typically c:\Program Files\CruiseControl.NET\server). During development, feel free to name that as your output directory.

The namespace and class name are not important. However, you need to add an attribute, ReflectorType, to the class. The constructor takes a string. That string is the node you specify in ccnet.config.

I think it is time for an example.

This can be tested by the following configuration file:

When you connect your cctray to the project and force it you’ll get a happy message box. Please refrain from using actual message boxes on your server! This is something you should try at home, not at work

There are times when your publisher needs some configuration. This is easily accomplished by more attributes;

The config file now looks like

If you specify Required=True you will get a startup failure if the xmlnode is not specified!

Some properties are numbers (he said numbly). Fear not, just adorn the adornment some:

There is also the odd chance you need a list of items as a property to your publisher. That’s a tad bit more involved, but here goes. First, the config file we want to specify looks like:

In other words, a list of recipients that each have a name. First, the property on the publisher-class:

To make sure we don’t inadvertently hand out nulls we need to add a constructor as well

We also need to define the class to hold each item. Luckily it is simple.

Test it in your Run-method.

There are a few more attributes that can be used, but I must admit I haven’t investigated them thoroughly. The NetReflector package is available on sourceforge here.

At any rate, this article should be enough to get you started. I’ll definitely start implementing some of my publisher ideas – the Twitter Publisher is admittedly already done, but it was only number three on my list.

–Jesper Hogstrom

To make things perfect, I wanted all the machines to run VMWare tools. On some machines that was as simple as selecting the appropriate menu item.

However, in some other cases it was simply not that simple. I needed to do the whole thing manually. For now, I’ll skip over the details of that and cut to the chase.

I tried to upgrade my kernel so I could recompile some vmware tools drivers when something went terribly wrong.

When I rebooted, all I had was a black screen saying “GRUB _” and it didn’t accept a single key stroke.

Luckily, it wasn’t the most important machine, but still – things didn’t look too good.

After spending some time on google, I found that others had had the same problem, and it seemed to having to do with the MBR (Master Boot Record) being messed up. It made kind of sense, but what then?

A thread I found on an Ubuntu site mentioned something called the Super Grub Disk. I downloaded it from http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ and uploaded it to the ESXi data storage.

Add a CD to the VM and point it to the ISO image.

Next – how to get the VM to change boot sequence?

Shut down the VM, edit settings and check the little box.

Save and reboot.

The interface is somewhat different – but plain menu driven! For me, it worked to simply select the menu options with help, select language, opt for Gnu/Linux and then “Fix boot of Gnu/Linux (GRUB)”. 0.1 seconds later I got an OK message, shut down the machine and switched back the boot order.

It just worked, The machine is back online. Now it’s time to beat the next generation in table tennis one more time before I install the VMWare tools.

A piece of advice: Take snapshots before you upgrade the kernel!

–Jesper Hogstrom

I alluded to my initial conversion issues in this post. While I learned more than I asked for, it seems it wasn’t quite necessary to use the lsilogic adapter. Buslogic worked just as fine…

First, credit where credit is due. I gathered all my information from http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi and http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/howto-convert-vmware-windows-xp-ide-disk-to-lsilogic-scsi.

Having converted a couple of disks, I felt obliged to add the minor details I managed to add to the process.

Not that I’m a sissy, but one never knows. Close the virtual machine and backup!

My disks hadn’t been defragmented in a while – as I didn’t even know that was possible, so lets start doing that:

When I read the other posts, I was quite worried about not having a “small vmdk-file” that contained the disk description. Fear not! It will magically appear after the next step: Disk conversion. While we’re at it, give the disk a better name. Delete the old disk. We have a backup, remember?

The virtual physical layout of the disks will change when we convert it to a SCSI disk, but the number of sectors remain the same. Check the number of sectors you have now:

The number 25165824 will be used to create a dummy SCSI disk. YOUR NUMBER WILL NOT BE THE SAME!

If you’re like me and prefer to copy entire lines and avoid remembering numbers between screens, here goes:

Either way, look at the scsi.vmdk file and copy the lines the look similar to

Open virtualmachine1.vmdk and replace the lines that have the same keys.

Now we need to make some changes to the vmx-file. The vmx-files don’t seem to care about the order of values. My file was hard to navigate in, as keys were not collated. To the rescue:

Edit the vmx-file and remove/comment out the ide0:0* keys.

Find the section mentioning scsi, or place it in the correct alphabetical place:

I already had the key ’scsi0.present = “TRUE”‘ present. Having the key twice prevents the machine from starting!

If you changed names on the vmx-file, remove the old machine from the inventory in VMWare server console. Open the new vmx-file. Start it.

Important: If you did rename the files, you will get a question if you want to keep or replace the identifier. Most likely you want to KEEP the identifier. After all it is the same machine.

If everything worked as expected, delete the backup directory. You can also delete scsi.* from your VM directory. If it didn’t work out – restore the directory, start from top of page and read more carefully.

–Jesper Hogstrom

I’ll cover the gory details of that in another post. At this point, all you need to know is that ESXi doesn’t support IDE disks, only SCSI disks. Most of my VMs have IDE disks. Sigh.

After crawling the net for a while I found some extremely useful posts covering what needs to be done:

http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi and http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/howto-convert-vmware-windows-xp-ide-disk-to-lsilogic-scsi.

One of the first things that must be done is to install the LsiLogic driver. I opted for the WHQL 1.20.18.00.

The problem then is to upgrade the BIOS. I must admit I am not exactly sure if that is a required step, but I did it anyway. Why is it a problem? Well, a set of files need to be placed on a bootable floppy drive. And my lappy doesn’t have a floppy slot.

Luckily there is a way. Open the settings for the machine.

Add a Floppy. Make sure you select to create a blank floppy image.

Specify a filename and do NOT connect at power on.

Start the VM. Once booted, connect the disk.

Open windows explorer, right-click the A: disk and select Format

Make sure to create a startup disk.

Click start and the process is over in a few seconds.

Now you can put the files from the LsiLogic BIOS package on the disk. If you are running VMWare Workstation you can simply drag them from the host machine into the VM. Note that you should NOT copy LSI’s command.com. It simply didn’t work well for me; something about a corrupt image. Just take all the other files.

Shut down the VM, open settings, select the floppy and have it connect on power on.

Start the VM again. It will now boot from the floppy assuming your VM BIOS is set like mine. Press F2 during booting and make sure:

If you made any changes, exit and save changes.

A familiar screen…

Run the install-command and ponder which option suits you. I chose (a).

On the next screen, I chose (t)

Then quit your way out.

To be quite honest I don’t think this worked as well as I hoped. At least when I do it again and again I manage to see something about “base address not found”. Maybe it works only once? Or maybe this step isn’t required.

At any rate, I thought it was a nifty way to solve the problem with creating a boot disk under vmware when I needed one. Or at least thought I did.

–Jesper Högström

Then one day it struck me – what if the developer is away for a week and the customer files an urgent bug report… Who gets notified? The answer is: The developer who isn’t there.

A simple solution is to force all project managers to check on their projects every day to make sure reports don’t fall between chairs. There are two things wrong with that solution imho:

* It’s error prone as it assumes people will always do what they are told and never forget.
* It doesn’t entail a single piece of new technology…

As I already had some scripts doing data extraction from the mantis database I figured something along the following would work:

* For each project; list all managers with an internal email address.
* For each project, select new bugs and list them with some info about the bug.
* Send the bug reports to the managers for the project.

Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it.

Here’s the script to get all the project managers

Save it as projectmanagers.sql

Worth noting is the filtering on email addresses. In some cases we assign manager rights to the project champion on the customer side. Yu may or may not want them to get the bug report email. Your call.

Here’s a shell script to get the list and then call an awk script to do the rest.

Save it as bugreports and make it executable with chmod +x bugreports
There are some things worth noting:
* I specify the path to the mantis configuration file. This is to avoid having to specify the db credentials twice. I guess I could have extracted the php-variables using php, but I don’t know much php. This works, assuming you formatted your config_inc.php file in a reasonable way.
* The bulk of the work is obviously done elsewhere. You do know about awk, don’t you?
* Getting the slashes right in mantisbaseurl took a few minutes

Here comes the awk script.

Save it as bugreports.awk

This script will operate on all lines in the /tmp/projman file (with all the project managers in it) and do the following:
* Replace some stuff in a file named bugreports.rsql using sed.
* Put mail headers in a text file
* Execute the expanded sql-file and put the result in the text file that makes up the mail
* Could the number of lines in the mail
* If there are any lines above and beyond the headers, send the mail to the manager.

Save it as bugreports.rsql

This will select all bugs in status new (i.e. resolution = 10) that are younger than 5 days and come from a project with the number PROJNUM. We actually use sed to replace PROJNUM with the actual project id and also BASEURL with the g_path variable in config_inc.php.

The mail you send will look something like

123 (http://mydomain.tld/mantis/view.php?id=123)      Project_1       \
developer1 70      2008-10-09      1       \
System stops when power cord is removed.
148 (http://http://mydomain.tld/mantis/view.php?id=148)      Project_1       \
developer2  50      2008-10-08      2       \
Saving big images consumes a lot of disk.

I put line breaks in there manually

I admit it could be done somewhat more glitzy with fireworks and images and what have you. However, it’s merely a status report and there is no need to add more – possibly the column headers.

The scripts make very few assumptions about how you have configured things. Feel free to change what doesn’t suit you (like age of bugs, status, who gets mail).

I run my script nightly by symlinking it to /etc/cron.daily.

–Jesper Högström

Here’s a shell script I wrote to handle the situation.

What the script does is
* Get the list of registered machines
* For each machine,
* if it’s running – suspend, backup, restore
* else backup

Much ofthe time was spent handling the completely silly idea of putting spaces in file names.

Note that you must probably change the backup target directory high up in the script. I mounted my ReadNAS+ with 1.5TB space for backups…

Put the script somewhere, make it runnable and symlink it into /etc/cron.daily or cron.weekly

chmod +x backupvms
ln -s backupvms /etc/cron.daily

It is worth noting that I ran into problems as not all services on all machines handled the suspend/restore cycle well. The backing up worked just fine, though

–Jesper Högström

The following is of essence:

• Version Control System
• Build Machine
• Bug Tracking System
• Install Builder
• Test Harness
• Project Planning Application
• Project Portal/meeting space
• Documentation Platform

In addition to the above, you may want to investigate stuff like

• Code coverage analyzer
• Change/churn analyzer
• Data repository for all the data points

It is worth noting that you still need to have an administrative infrastructure that suits your and your customers’ needs, like

• Time reporting
• Project plans
• Test plans
• Staged testing environments (quote a technical need)
• Budget and follow up
• Reporting structure to customer

I’m off to watch TV with my son (it is Friday evening after all ), but next time around I’ll start a walk-through of the tools I have found and used for the various pieces you really do not want to live without when developing software.

–Jesper Högström

The system you want to look into is CruiseControl.Net. I hope to get into some of the nice things it can do. For now, suffice it to say it connects to a source control system, pulls changes, spawns a build and informs interested parties about what just happened.

One of the interested parties will very likely be CCTray, a tray icon application that shows a green or – as it sometimes happens – red light in your tray area of the desktop.

Sometimes that is enough, sometimes not. What I want is a clearly visible light, like a lavalamp or something that bubbles away in the corresponding color. If I’m crazy, I am not alone – Ken Nichols and Nigel Thorne offer two excellent examples of seemingly sane people that had the same idea.

Using the publisher pattern of Nigel’s is a really elegant idea. Unfortunately my build server sits in a server room with no windows, and way too far for an extension cord to my lava lamp. Thus, I resorted to Ken’s approach of hacking CCTray with the idea of connecting everything to my development box. Due to a variety of reasons that didn’t work out so well, so I employed an old lap top to listen to build events and control the lava lamp.

Controlling the lava lamp by software and hardware is explained in this post.

Hacking cctray

Thanks to Ken’s post I found a nice entry point to cctray.

The BuildTransitionLavaLamp class is defined as

What this code does is simply to

• Load some config from an ini-file
• plug into the listening event of project transitions
• Send commands to the card.

The config file is simply an ini-file with project names.

The sample projects lava_pass and lava_fail are defined as

Compile everything and move onto the machine hosting the relay card and you’re done.

–Jesper Högström

I tested it with a test application I found somewhere, and it worked! I write software on my day job, but I am still childishly impressed by controlling real world objects by means of a computer (and no – the caps lock diod doesn’t count ).

The main purpose of the board was to integrate it into another process, and that required accessing it from a .Net application. I searched the net but couldn’t find anything that did the trick, so I decided to write my own API to it. I normally do not write com-port stuff so there was a bit of a learning curve, but eventually I got it where I fund it usable. Figured you may too, so here goes…

Feel free to use it as you see fit.

–Jesper Högström

First, download the free rsync package from itefix.no. The installation instructions are as easy as can be, simply unzip the installer exe and run it.

The rsync package you’ve just downloade is based on cygwin. Cygwin is a really cool package that allows compiling and running linux apps under windows. If you ever wanted a proper shell instead of cmd and you were too cheap to buy 4DOS/4NT (which apparently is discontinued ) cygwin just might save your day.

rsync is an inherently command line based tool. No fancy graphics or point-and-shoot style UIs. To synchronize the server exposed directory images onto your windows box, simply open a command shell and type

[c:\]cd \remotedata
[c:\remotedata] rsync --recursive rsync://mylinuxbox.local.domain/images images

There are loads of switches, and you may want to familiarize yourself with some of them. Type

rsync --help

to get a glimpse.

–Jesper Hogstrom