Arthur moved on with programming and testing. Now we uploaded the first packages, which now contain the basic calendar and contacts synchronisation. The plugins already are able to synchronize our personal data.
You can find the packages on the download pages of the Kolab Sync for Outlook und Kolab Sync for Android projects.
Please use the issue trackers there for feedback.
We are proud to announce the first developer preview for Kolab sync clients for both Android and Outlook. Both are licensed under the GPLv3.
Using this software you will be able synchronize your contacts and calendar to any IMAP folder. Every item is saved in a separate Email using the Kolab Storage Format. This allows for interoperability with other Kolab Clients.
Please join us on the Google code projects for the Android and the Outlook connectors.
Since there are still quite a few rough edges, this is only a developer preview to publish the already done work. Read on for a more detailed status of the development so far.
I didn’t know that: the VS2008 debugger has many bugs. Specifically, if you have a solution with multiple websites, debugging doesn’t work!
Symptom: Upon reaching a breakpoint, StepOver/Into do not work, but resume execution. This makes the debugger pretty pointless.
There is an update for this available since february the fourth, 2009(!). I’m wondering why this was not distributed via Windows Update. Anyways, here’re the links:
On the “Using Studio’s “Custom Tool” in MSBuild” question, I was prompted to share the code. Here is a stripped down skeleton where I removed the actual calls to the custom tool. Since it is open source I didn’t really need to access the Visual Studio’s registry keys.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ever since setting up our CruiseControl.NET server for our internal projects, I wanted to integrate a Gendarme run to catch all those nasty little things that slip through, like not checking arguments for null.
Now that I finally found some tuits to do it, the next problem became obvious: doing a quick commit often lead to a quick build fail. Gendarme would have no use if it didn’t find anything, no? So the missing piece was integration into Visual Studio. Arthur hacked together a little XSLT+PowerShell and voila, Gendarme now runs on every build right from the studio and populates the “Error List” window with properly linked entries. Yay!
Read on for the details of the implementation. The complete source is downloadable at the end of the article.
All tests ok, but still a NUnit failure?
Seeing unexplicable “System.AppDomainUnloadedException: Attempted to access an unloaded AppDomain.” errors?
You might be a victim of nunit’s bug #423611.
A typical error message looks like this:
Unhandled exceptions:
1) : System.AppDomainUnloadedException: Attempted to access an unloaded AppDomain.
I’ve uploaded a minimal solution exhibiting the problem to the bugreport and I hope that’ll help clearing the issue up.
Recently I’ve spent some time setting up a CruiseControl.NET instance for our internal projects. Using this project, we have an automatic and immediate feedback whether our checkins work without having to waste developer time waiting on the full unit test suite.
To improve response times of the server running CC.Net while integrating, I’ve applied the ProcessPriority patch from CCNET-504 and now run all processes at BelowNormal. Now there is no noticeable impact on other services on the server while a build is running. Since the patch didn’t apply cleanly to the newest CC.Net version, I updated the patch to current HEAD and posted it in the bugtracker. Thanks to Craig Sutherland the patch is now applied in the HEAD and will be released with 1.5. Having already wet my feet, I proposed a refactoring for the Tasks to move all common properties to the BaseExecutableTask class, thereby removing ~300 lines of code and unifying the diverse set of properties currently in the wild. This will have to wait for the next release in order to not interfere with a timely 1.5 release.
Currently CC.Net builds the projects from subversion, runs all unit tests with NUnit and checks code quality with Gendarme.
While integrating Gendarme in our build process, I found and reported two bugs in the rules, which triggered false positives on our code. Thanks to Sebastien Pouliot both appear to be already fixed and slated for release with the next Gendarme (2.8).
After looking for quite a while (it is unbelievable, no?) I have to accept that Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 do not fully support IEEE-754 floating point numbers. Specifically NaN (Not-a-Number) and +/- Infinity are not allowed. While the 2000 Server seemingly allows such values to be inserted, but breaks badly afterwards, the newer versions disallow inserting such values. Here is the MS Connect article requesting the feature. There is also the documentation about float data and a read-between-the-lines hint in the documentation for XPath numbers. The article describing floats is very circumspect about this:
The behavior of float and real follows the IEEE 754 specification on approximate numeric data types.
[emphasis mine]
The XPath article states it clearly:
However, float(53) is not exactly IEEE 754. For example, neither NaN (Not-a-Number) nor infinity is used.
.
For completeness, here’s a little review about other DMBS’ support for NaNs and Infinity:
Thanks to Clifford, the videos from the Linuxwochenende are available now. Here’s the direct link to my german puppet talk.
On Saturday the 24th, I’ll be holding a short talk about puppet at the Linuxwochenende (Linux-Weekend) in the Metalab, a hackerspace in Vienna, Austria. I’m looking forward to spreading “the message” 
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