I’m Back: Holiday’s Over, Time to Write!

Back to Life, Back to Reality

I have returned from my annual visit to see the in-laws in China, and once again I have worked on some nice goodies to add to CruiseControl.NET (CC.NET).

This time I was looking at two specific areas:

• Converting to streams for results
• A Silverlight RIA

Stream-based Results (Project Ares)

The streams functionality is to try and resolve a long-time issue with running out of memory. Currently CC.NET performs all of its result processing in-memory as strings. This means when a task runs, it generates an in-memory version of the results (e.g. from stdout/stderr or from importing file results). These results are then appended to an ever-increasing copy of the log file, which is finally written out to disk. Now this is fine if 1) the results are small or 2) you have lots of memory, but this can cause problems if these conditions are not met! Additionally the same problem applies not only to generating the results, but retrieving the results!

The solution is simple in concept – instead of writing to memory, write directly to disk instead – hence changing to using streams instead of strings. However like any non-trivial modification, this has a number of far-reaching implications, so it was not as easy as just changing from generating streams to writing to streams.

However, the good news is I got it working, although it still needs a bit of polish to get it working nicely. And the other good news is I documented what I did along the way So over the next few weeks I’ll be reviewing and publishing this documentation on my blog. These posts will be published under Project Ares.

Silverlight Client (Project Capricorn)

The other area I played with was writing a Silverlight 3.0 client for CruiseControl.NET. This was more of a fun project to see what was possible (although it didn’t help that I was offline and had to go by trial and error).

For this project I wanted a similar type of interface to the current dashboard. This allows people to view information at four levels: farm (all monitored servers), server, project and build. More challengingly it allows people to develop their own plug-ins (either via code or XSL-T) and use these within the UI.

As well as implementing a basic dashboard-like UI, I wanted to lever some of the rich functionality that is available in Silverlight – things that are possible in HTML/CSS/Javascript, but are challenging to do.

So, I have put together a very rough implementation of a Silverlight client, although it is very much at a prototype stage. This allows for the basics of the UI (layout, navigation, etc.) plus a plug-in infrastructure for adding new plug-ins. Unfortunately both need work to get up to release level.

So, once I have finished writing about the stream changes I’ll write up about the Silverlight client under Project Capricorn. Hopefully there will be some interest in it, so we can look at completing the project and including it in the official codebase (probably for CC.NET 2.0). Otherwise I’ll move it to the FastForward.NET project and work on it as I have time.

But Wait, There’s More!

Another area that I’ve been slowly working towards for a while now is the ability to make CC.NET distributed. CC.NET as it currently stands has some distributed elements, but it doesn’t really work as a distributed application. Some of the changes I’ve been working on (messaging, hot-upgrades, etc.) have been pieces of the distributed puzzle. The streaming work added a couple more pieces of the puzzle, plus showed a few more challenges to be resolved!

So I’ll be adding a few posts on enhancing CC.NET to be distributed – either some of the issues involved or some of the pieces that have been added. Hopefully by the time we (finally) get to the 2.0 release CC.NET will be able to work as a distributed application

That’s All For Now

So that’s what I’m planning on writing up over the next few weeks. At the same time I’ll be adding the source to SourceForge (under the CCNet2 branch) and hopefully spending some time with the other devs on getting CC.NET ready for the “official” 1.5 release.

Stay tuned…