The week started off very well. I was able to finish off implementing sensors for all of the Event Services. Unfortunately, I just learned that I may have done things a tad incorrectly as I was using the specifications for Hackystat version 7 instead of version 8. Not a big problem as it should only require a small change to correct. I was also able to fix smaller connection issues which resulted in the data being kept offline even when it should have been sent to the Hackystat server. It seems I had been overriding the “Owner” field which is used to validate that the data is being sent from a user that exists in the hackystat database. Replacing this with the owner who sent the data from the VSTFS database made Hackystat get confused about who was sending what.
I’ve been encountering some other strange connection issues. Some data seems to be getting lost somewhere. If I am offline the data correctly gets stored in niftly little xml files by the sensorshell and when I next go online they get sent out fairly quickly. Though when I am already online some of the data does not always get transmitted through.
My hypothesis:
a. Data is being lost because its formated incorrectly. Easy to test, easy to fix.
b. Data is being lost because of the current server setup. Not so easy to fix.
I suspect it may be more of B than A. It may be that because the data must fly through the sensorshell, then through the virtual machines “virtual network card” to the host computers real network card to the network then into the server (which is running quite slow), it may be that the server just isn’t getting the data and since my side (client) technically sent the data its not getting stored offline either. In any case I now have a critical priority ticket to fix the problem. Thats goal number 1 for next week.
A second problem I had was that my version of Visual Studio didn’t have the test suite tools add-in installed on it which meant I couldn’t write any proper unit tests this week. Luckily I obtained the Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite through MSDNAA and have installed it so that I can now start writing some tests (YAY!).
Another piece of good news is that Greg Wilson has pointed me to Jean-Luc David who has written two books on TFS (Team foundation Server) and VSTS (Visual Studio Team Systems) and has graciously offered to answer some of my more pressing questions about them. Hopefully this means next week I will be able to ramp up really quickly and get version 1.0 of the sensor out the door.
By the by: I plan to have version 3.0 done by summers end. (everyone knows that 3.0 is always the best version 😉 )
Matthew Basset's Hackystat Development Blog 
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