I am not MIA

I kindof forgot to post an update last week. Sorry all. Then I got sick this week for a few days which hampered my progress somewhat. Not to worry though. I didn’t just sit around doing nothing I actually did some reading. At a university industry lunch  I was given the book “Professional Team Foundation Server” book by Jean-Luc David who co-wrote. It really has a lot of good material for using and extending Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. After I recovered a bit from my cold/flu/bug I began to write some Unit Tests that incorporated some of the things I had learned from the book. For example I really wanted to be able to programming check-in things to source control or work items so I could truly test the system instead of simply using mock data. I haven’t worked out all the bugs for the new Unit Tests this week so they are not in source control yet but hopefully but Tuesday next week.

Also sometime within the past two weeks I was able to fix a small bug with the sensorshell controller which would create multiple instances instead of just one. I also added some simple controls for manually shutting the sensorshell control down without reset the server. Theoretically this would be useful if the sensorshell needs to be updated while the server is running. Any data received during that time is of course lost though.

I also extended the functionality of the subscription service. Team Foundation Server allows users to specify XPath expressions when subscribing to a service and I put in the necessary GUI to allow for that to work. This lead me to realize that I had not been validating any of my input fields. Since its so easy to validate input in ASP.NET I added some validation controls and used the C# XPath library with these controls to check whether the XPath expression was correct. It was pretty easy to do but it really made things alot more robust.

Lastly I added some extra settings to allow users to easily specify default settings before the server loads. The original settings are loaded from a file and then additional settings can be loaded from the VSTFS database if they wish. An example settings file. If a setting is missing or corrupt a default setting will be created upon server load.

Lastly. I was also able to figure out how to link external cs files into the Unit Test project so that I did not need to copy them.

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