fidzu : Mono

On the series of posts about Plastic SCM extension with task tracking tool, let´s see how to use Mantis extension!

As on the case of other extensions, Plastic SCM extension with Mantis provides with two different working mode options: "task on branch" and "task on changeset", on this post I will talk about the first of them. To set up the extension in Plastic you must copy the ?mantisextension.dll?? library to the folder where you have installed Plastic SCM client and insert the following lines (circled in red) on the "client.conf" file:



You also need to create a "mantisextension.conf" file, which must have the following appearance:

<MantisExtensionConfiguration>

 <MantisBaseUrl>http://localhost:8888</MantisBaseUrl>

 <Branchprefix>SCM</Branchprefix>

 <workingmode>TaskOnBranch</workingmode>

</MantisExtensionConfiguration>

Being MantisBaseUrl the Url on which Mantis is installed.

Branchprefix is the prefix will have the created branches on PlasticSCM that you want to associate with Mantis issue. As the working mode we want to use is "task on branch", we specify it.

Once the extension is set and Mantis issues have been created we can start working!
The first step on this working mode is creating a task in Plastic, which must have the same name as the Mantis issue we want to link it to (in this case as the prefix is SCM we have to for example create branch /scm004 to link it with issue 4). Please be aware that using the "task on branch" working mode one single Mantis issue corresponds with one single Plastic SCM branch.

After the branch has been created, if you want to see the extension information you only have to go to the branch view and click on the "Show extended information option" on the top, then select the newly created branch and a menu on the right with the extension information will be displayed as the following image shows:




The extension information shows:

• the name of the Mantis issue,
  
• its owner, description,
  
• comment
  
• and status.
  
  By clicking on it, an Explorer window with the associated branch issue will be opened, so that when the user wants to change the status of the issue or its description, he will only have to refresh it on the Plastic branch extended information and the new information will appear.

23 Jul 2008 6:30pm GMT

Does anyone know of such strange, yet delightful, gathering? I would like to see how things are going in mono land...

23 Jul 2008 4:13pm GMT

Has anyone told you that a program is "erroring off" or that some system "errored off?" Occasionally I have the pleasure of receiving such notices and every time it makes me cringe. Let me explain something. "Error" is not a verb. You can't error. It's not possible. When you type "erroring" [...]

23 Jul 2008 8:59am GMT

Hi guys,

several months went by without any post, but I didn't remain idle.
During this time I made a lots of things but now I'm glad to post an update to sugar-sharp.

This update will let you to use the datastore service that Sugar makes available to store your data.
The datastore data are used by the Journal and can be integrated with the school server.
This version is a very low-level API because it's a one-to-one mapping with the DBUS services. In the next version I will create a new class to allow you an easier way to access to the data on the datastore.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

You can find the instruction about compilation of mono here, and here you can find the source code.


Happy hacking to all

23 Jul 2008 7:37am GMT

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.5! Its been 2 months since our last release and a lot of good progress has been made.

What's New?

Upgrade to the newest version of MySql Connector
Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.2
Upgrade to the latest version of NeatHtml
Usability Improvements for google map enabled features and improvements to the search architecture as mentioned in this previous blog post.
A number of bug fixes as reported in the forums since the last release.
WebStore Improvements - the web store now supports selling download products using Authorize.NET, PaPal, and Google Checkout
A new plugin system for handling PageCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a page is created - not yet documented
A new plugin system for handling UserCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a nw user is created - not yet documented.

As always, be sure and backup your database and site before upgrading, and if you run into any problems post in the forums and we will try to help.

The Semi Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store

I call it semi grand because no real products are available yet, all you can do in the store is buy me a beer at the moment. I expect to have my first product, Event Calendar Pro available by the end of July. You can see what I have so far for the Event Calendar Pro feature on the demo site http://demo.mojoportal.com/events.aspx. I decided to go ahead and open the store now because I thought it might interest others who want to use the mojoPortal WebStore to sell download products. The WebStore feature is very rudimentary now but it will be getting more love as I improve it to meet my own ecommerce needs. I will try to update some documentation on the WebStore soon. The one tip I will mention is you configure "Products" then you configure "Offers". Products are not sold directly, but by Offers. An Offer can have 1 or more products and price is set at the Offer level, not at the product level. The Product Catalog is very bare bones, we don't have categories yet so its really only good for a short list of products.

I've also opened up a store on CafePress to sell mojoPortal merchandise: http://www.cafepress.com/mojoportal.

A great way to support mojoPortal, each item purchased contributes $5 to the project.

I'll announce the real Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store as soon as our first product is available.

Joe Audette ...

23 Jul 2008 7:09am GMT

It was a lot of time since I blogged for the last time, and I should write some news: Gendarme has reached the 0.2 release. You can read the release notes if you want more information. I have passed the mid-term evaluation and I will continue adding rules, fixes, trimming down false positives … I'm generating [...]

22 Jul 2008 8:06pm GMT

at 7/14/2008 11:57:19 PM poupou said... Looks like the branch was delayed a bit. That gave me the time to update the MD and VS.NET solution and project files (to match the makefiles) and the (quite long) NEWS for the release. I also started to apply the newer rules to Gendarme itself. More to come...

---

at 7/14/2008 8:38:15 AM nestor said... I have generated the Gendarme report with the latest svn, and I have included a lot of new rules in the checking following the poupou spreadsheet. You can see it here: http://www.babuine.net/gendarme-reports/2.0-reports/07-14-2008/master-index.xml

---

Read older news...

22 Jul 2008 4:34pm GMT

As described in the roadmap, PLinq implementation work has started a week ago. Some good bits are already there like what I consider to be the 3 most important operators (because most of the others can be expressed using these ones) : Select, Where and Aggregate. Following is a discussion on the specificities of PLinq, [...]

22 Jul 2008 4:12pm GMT

On Tuesday of last week we branched Mono for the 2.0 release; Packages are being QAed for our first release candidate and will be available next week. Bug fixing for the final release will happen on this branch.

Meanwhile, the excitement continues on trunk. Zoltan today merged the Linear IL branch.

The Linear IL code has been under development for two years and eight months and it was an effort that we started to address some of the main limitations in our current JIT design. Some of these limitations in the old design made it very hard to bring some code generation optimizations into the JIT, or made the optimizations not as effective as they could have been.

The new JIT engine will debut in Mono 2.1, later this year. Now that Linear IL is the default, the entire JIT team will focus on tuning the engine and extracting more performance out of it. But even without tuning, the new engine is already performing very well as you can see in the results comparing the engines.

Additionally, a number of creative ideas that we have to improve Mono all depended on doing this switch. We have a few surprises for developers in the next coming months.

Congratulations to Zoltan for getting this work merged.

22 Jul 2008 1:58pm GMT

As we saw on the previous post on how to use Plastic SCM and Bugzilla extension, there are two different options to work with the extension, depending on the working pattern your company is using, we are now going to look into the ?Task on Changeset? option, which would be used for companies using the ?Mainline development? pattern or ?Branch per developer?.
In order to configure the extension for this working method you must set up the same ?bugzillaextension.dll? but in this case the file ?bugzillaextension.conf? changes, so it must have the following appearance:

<BugzillaExtensionConfiguration>

 <BugzillaBaseUrl>

   http://192.168.1.14:8888/bugzilla/3.0/

 </BugzillaBaseUrl>

 <BranchPrefix>SCM</BranchPrefix>

   <WorkingMode>

     TaskOnChangeset

   </WorkingMode>

 </BugzillaExtensionConfiguration>

And you will be ready to start working!
As on the previous case, we start working by creating a new task on Bugzilla assigned to ?tester?, so its status is left as assigned:

In this case we can see that the bug number is 14 and we had previously included other bugs, we can have a look at the list of bugs using Bugzilla search tool:

And the result of the search is the bugs we have on the system with New, Assigned, Reopened or Resolved status, on which we can find the newly added bug, number 14:

Now let´s do some work and edit the mentioned file ?assfile? in order to carry out the assigned ask: we just go to Plastic, check out the file, edit it and check in: at this point Plastic will open a new window in order to include the ?checkin information? with the following appearance:

Here the user can include his checkin comments and link the check in operation (changeset) with the related bug or bugs, as on the ?Task per Changeset? one or more than one changeset can be linked to one or more than one task or bug.
If we click on the ?Add new issue? option another window will be opened, and from it we can choose the bug to be linked, in this case we link bug 14 as shown on the following image:

And there we have it!, if we go to the ?changesets view? we can find the information of the bugzilla bugs linked to each of the changesets, from this view we can also link more bugs to a changeset or delete previously added bugs, and as on the case of the ?Task on branch? working method, we can also go to Bugzilla, make changes on the bugs and change them any time!

Hope you like it!

22 Jul 2008 2:49am GMT

While visiting Thailand the authorities have discovered 50 Kilos of Heroin in your bags. You are thrown into a crowded dark prison and forced to fend for yourself. A fellow inmate offers you protection in exchange for a Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 Hello World Application. You agree to the deal and then realize....THE THAI PRISON COMPUTERS ARE RUNNING OPEN SUSE 11 (with Moonlight from SVN). Luckily, that isn't too difficult with Moonlights toolset.

First off create a directory named HelloWorld. It's important that we name our directory the same thing as our application because some of the tools use the directory name to figure out the application name.

The first thing we need to do is create the XAML for our top level Control. In Silverlight 2 the top level element is a UserControl not a Canvas like in Silverlight 1. A basic UserControl will have a code behind file and child controls, here's our basic UserControl:

<UserControl x:Class="HelloWorld.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<TextBlock Text="Hello"/>
</UserControl>

Pretty simple stuff here. We've created a UserControl that we'll call Page and stuck a TextBox inside of it.

Next up, we need to create some code for our Page. The only important thing we need to do in our Page's code is call InititalizeComponent. The InitializeComponent method will be created for us later by our tools.

Here's my Page.xaml.cs code:
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;

namespace HelloWorld {
public partial class Page : UserControl
{
public Page()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
}
}

We'll ignore the code behind files for now, since our tools will create that for us. Now, all we have left is our App. There isn't anything interesting happening in our App.xaml:

?<Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Class="HelloWorld.App">

</Application>


However, App.xaml.cs is going to set the root visual of our application to our HelloWorld.Page class:

?using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;

namespace HelloWorld
{
public partial class App : Application
{

public App()
{
this.Startup += this.Application_Startup;
InitializeComponent();
}

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
this.RootVisual = new Page();
}
}
}

So we've got all our files now. We should have Page.xaml, Page.xaml.cs, App.xaml and App.xaml.cs. Great, but now we need to make it into a .xap file. There's a bunch of steps here, but luckily the mxap tool will handle all of this for us. Just run mxap in your HelloWorld project's directory and it will:

1. Generate an application manifest (AppManifest.xaml).
2. Create the codebehind files for our .xaml files (Page.xaml.g.cs and App.xaml.g.cs)
3. Create a resource file containing our .xaml files (HelloWorld.g.resource)
4. Compile all of our C# code
5. Zip everything up into a .xap file

You can download the source for this demo here.

22 Jul 2008 1:40am GMT

In case you weren't following our tweets yesterday, we both completed the ride in reasonably good time. Nat's motionbased report is here, and mine is here. A few things: This was only the second or third ride with my new seat. Normally this would be a bad idea, but there was no way I could have done [...]

21 Jul 2008 7:39pm GMT

A discussion on programming ("software engineering" if you want to get all fancy) arose on an IRC channel, and a few interesting links were posted. This video is perhaps the best visual representation that I've seen of what a programmer's job is often like. Luckily, working at Mozilla and with the great people in our [...]

21 Jul 2008 7:09pm GMT

About two weeks ago I started collecting statistics for this website, something I've always planned on doing but never actually cared enough to sit down and do. Two weeks doesn't make for a great sample period but the results are still interesting. Almost 25% of visitors use some version of IE and 44% use Firefox. [...]

21 Jul 2008 10:03am GMT

From a recent interview on the design team for C# 4.0 Anders said about the room they meet to discuss the C# design:

We have been meeting in this room for nine years, three times a week.

This seems to be one of the reasons C# has evolved so nicely.

Sadly there are no actual details on the interview about what is coming up on C# 4.0. We have to wait until the PDC to get an idea of what will be coming.

Luckily, Mono's C# compiler is already 3.0 compliant, and we are ready to start adding 4.0 features the moment they become public.

21 Jul 2008 12:10am GMT

My friend Mirco Bauer has been maintaining and coordinating the Mono packaging for Debian for many years.

Today he released smuxi. His own IRC client that he built on top of Gtk#:

21 Jul 2008 12:05am GMT