Steady as she goes

Its been a particularity normal week. I am continually going through mounds and mounds of documentation just to find information on the simplest things. For example, the supported events are very poorly documented. No one source lists all the events and what causes each event to trigger. I plan to fix that in the coming weeks. Despite this I was able to get the sensor tool to record some of the larger types of data that are strictly (I hope to go beyond the event system) given by VSTFS’ event system:

• Additional Source Control changes (Branching, moving)
• Build Systems
• Work Items

There were/are also some connection issues when it comes to the sensorshell (the little guy that sends all the data to the hackystat server). I was able to restructure the web app so that only one instance of the sensorshell was created at a time 🙂 . This means that data can be quickly sent to the server or stored offline without the need to restart the service on every event. The problem with this approach though is that if the server crashes or is forcefully reset/stopped without making sure all sessions have been closed properly the child process (sensorshell) gets abandoned and outputs a text file like this.

… forever!!! Did I mention that it also takes up 100% of the CPU. For now this means that every time I run the development version I must forcefully kill the sensorshell process. I believe it has something to do with the instantiation of the sensorshell. I am currently using some of the code from the Visual Studio Sensor to initiate the shell and I may look into how it actually does this to see if this could possibly be the problem. It may also have something to do with multisensorshell. I will have to pour over the Hackystat docs to see exactly how this works.

Some other small fixes. I fixed the logging so that it now outputs to daily files and appends to the end of each log with a nice timestamp. Its a simple fix but it really helps. I finished the settings module. It will not look for the VSTFS server, create the Hackystat database/catalog if not already created, create the settings table and store the appropriate settings. Useful for anyone who wants to start testing this sensor right away. I have also made some minor changes to the wiki page, given myself a load of tickets and overhauled the subversion repository.

Plan of attack for next week is to continue implementing event detectors and begin writing some unit tests. I foresee problems with the whole unit-test situation as there are so many independent systems that if even one of them errors then the test will fail.

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