...at least that's the way it looks from the first 6 weeks.

I have actually got lots of legitimate reasons (like moving house) other than my laziness for not writing anything this year; hopefully this post will serve as a guilty reminder for me come up with something in the next few weeks!

I have always maintained an interest in workflow, and on a few occasions have been able to put it to use productively on some of my projects; from a good few years ago implementing WF as a web site process controller (see my post here on integrating WF with ASP.Net MVC), to a few months ago giving public presentation around the improved integration between WF and WCF in Net 3.5 (Send/Receive activities) at my current employer's regular community events.

Well, from reading the lead article in this month's MSDN magazine (and between-the-lines of some of the material released at this years PDC (start here for good overview)) it seems that when .Net 4.0 arrives WF may finally be reaching a level of maturity to justify a more mainstream role in the .Net world.

• There is a new WCF/WF integration model. Although only a year or so old, it seems the Send/Receive activities are to be little more than a stop-gap solution and will be replaced with new richer SendMessage/ReceiveMessage activities.
• The concept of WCF hosted workflows which was released in 3.5 is to be developed to a level it will now be possible to define both the workflow and the service and message contracts from within the workflow Xaml itself, reducing a good degree of redundant boilerplate code/configuration.
• The WF designer within Visual Studio is to be rewritten (hopefully withpout as many frustratingly erratic  bugs) to support this new functionality and to enhance the debugging experience of Xaml-only workflows.
• There is an update to the Server 2008 'Application Server' role (currently codenamed Dublin) in the pipeline which will add integrated management and tracking of workflow instances hosted within IIS.
• ...and probably most revolutionary of all - as the mechanism by which azure provides code execution in the cloud - hosted workflows may finally be the 'killer app' that forces otherwise ambivalent developers to take a fresh look at the technology as a means to solve their problems.

On the downside, though:

• The new flowchart workflow process model and various other activity execution model changes seem that they will require breaking backward compatability with custom activities written for .Net 3.5 and before. Although for those of you yet to make any significant investment in custom activities this may be hit you don't even notice.

Obviously much of this technology is at the announcement or early CTP stage, but I would seriously recommend reading the couple of articles in this month's MSDN magazine, downloading the PDC VS2010 CTP (including .Net 4.0), checking out registering for a trial account at the azure site and generally keeping your eye on WF over the next 12-18 months.

For the last 2 months (and until end of January next year) I have been working as Build Manager on a relatively large, and potentially high profile (when all the NDAs expire), project in the Solution Development Centre at Microsoft in Sydney.

Many of my friends have been asking all the obvious questions such as: What's the product I'm working on like? Who is the client? When will it go live? But also how projects are run internally at a large and professional outfit such as Microsoft. Well the time for me to tell all is not now, however, I can point to a post (here) by the Solution Architect of the project explaining how things are run on a daily basis.

Some of the early stuff I can't comment on, as I only joined the project mid-way, but the post is an accurate reflection of what happens here everyday; ie of a pragmatic and effective way to run a significant quality driven project in the face of complex and competing requirements.

I was reading this month's Microsoft Architecture Journal on the train home today when I came across this little nugget at the end of one of the articles...

Head in the Coud, Feet on the Ground, Microsoft Architecture Journal 

LOtSS* uses the cloud as an optimization opportunity driving overall costs down. Although this “faster, cheaper, better” view of the cloud is very important and is likely to be a key driver of cloud utilization, it is important to realize that it is only a partial view of what the cloud can offer. The cloud also presents opportunities for “not previously possible” scenarios. IT history has shown that over time, what was unique and strategic becomes commodity. The only thing that seems to stay constant is the need to identify new optimization opportunities continuously by selectively replacing subsystems with more cost-effective ones, while keeping the cost introduced by the substitute low. In other words, it seems that one of the few sustainable competitive advantages in IT is in fact the ability to master LOtSS.
* 'localized optimization through selective specialization'

...what struck a chord with me has nothing to do with cloud computing. But how relevant this statement is to exactly what skills are worth investing in during one's career. <insert latest hyped technology> may be the big thing now - and command big bucks for those who know it inside out - but the most sustainable career growth strategy in IT is an investment in developing the analysis skills that allow you to cut through to the real value in any technology, and the communication skills to be able to express this effectively to your customers and clients.

Background

As part of my current project we track and reporting on a number of source metrics (average/max methods per class, average/max calls per method, average/max cyclomatic complexity etc..) on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, as we are running Visual Studio/Team Foundation 2005 we are unable to use the built in metrics (and hence the integration with TFS) and so have fallen back to using an external product which has been filling this space for a long time called Source Monitor.

Anyway, when I joined the project this tracking was being done manually; a daily routine was in place where someone would...

• Perform a local get of the latest source.
• Check out the Source Monitor .smp project file.
• Open this and create a new check point (which for our code base takes a couple of minutes).
• And finally export the results as xml before running an xslt to generate html for pasting into an email for circulation.

Well, as we are running a pretty tight continuous integration ship (yes we had to build our own CI notification on top of VS 2005), this struck me from day one as an obvious candidate for improved automation. Today I finally got the few hours it took to knock up a custom MSBuild task to do the job.

Note: I honestly didn't want to go to this level of effort, but Source Monitor requires an 'instruction' file to be generated when executing at the command line and having searched the web, was actually surprised to only find a few examples of doing this. Most of them were very much CruiseControl or Nant focussed.

Implementation

The actual implementation takes its inspiration from these two posts (Dan Rigsby / Robin Curry), but instead of placing all the logic directly within xml, tries to encapsulate as much of the ugly glue into the c# implementation within the task… hopefully simplifying and improving the maintainability of the actual calling build script.

The task itself derives from ToolTask. It adds 3 properties (2 of which are 'required'):

• ProjectFile (Required): The path of the .smp file to execute Source Monitor against (you should create this interactively using the Source Monitor interface). 
• SummaryFile (Required): The path to write the Source Monitor summary report (in xml format).
• CheckPointName: The name to give to the new checkpoint within the project (If this is '' or omitted Source Monitor will use its own logic to name the checkpoint).

The following properties (inherited from ToolTask) are also relevant:

• ToolPath: The optional location to find SourceMonitor.exe (defaults to 'C:\Program Files\SourceMonitor\')
• ToolName: The optional filename of SourceMonitor.exe (defaults to 'SourceMonitor.exe'  - you should only need to change this if a new version of the tool changes the exe name)

Usage

So, the source to the task is attached in the zip file below (you will need to install Source Monitor separately yourself from here). Also included in this is a demonstration MSBuild .proj file (the next best thing to some proper unit tests) – hitting F5 from within Visual Studio will run this in debug, and it will generate a summary and details report on its own source code! If you simply want to use the task as-is within TFS server build then you will need to compile it then make the following changes to your build script:

• Copy the binary dll to: C:\Program Files\MsBuild\MSJ.MSBuildTasks.dll (or anywhere else, but this easily accessible from within scripts using the built-in $(MSBuildExtensionsPath) variable).
• Reference the task at the top of your script:

<UsingTask AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSJ.MSBuildTasks.dll" TaskName="SourceMonitor" />

• Call the task at an appropriate point (obviously this must be after the source is downloaded); I personally prefer BeforeCompile:

Note: As we store the Source Monitor project in source control, we must check this out to make it writeable before we execute the task (Source Monitor needs write access to add the new checkpoint).

<PropertyGroup>

    <!-- TF.exe -->

    <TF>&quot;$(TeamBuildRefPath)\..\tf.exe&quot;</TF>

    <SourceMonitorProjectFile>$(SolutionRoot)\SolutionProjectFile.smp</SourceMonitorProjectFile>

</PropertyGroup>

<Target Name="BeforeCompile">

<!-- Check out Source Monitor project (it needs to be writeable to add new checkpoint). --> 

    <Exec

        WorkingDirectory="$(SolutionRoot)" 

        Command="$(TF) checkout "$(SourceMonitorProjectFile)"" /> 

        <!-- Execute Source Monitor to add new checkpoint (named after the build number) and export summary/detail reports as xml. --> 

        <SourceMonitor 

            ProjectFile="$(SourceMonitorProjectFile)" 

            SummaryFile="$(SolutionRoot)\Build Reports\SourceMonitorSummary.xml" 

            DetailsFile="$(SolutionRoot)\Build Reports\SourceMonitorDetails.xml" 

            CheckPointName="$(BuildNumber)" 

            /> 

    <!-- Check in Source Monitor project with new checkpoint (use /override flag to avoid check-in policy issues). --> 

    <Exec

        WorkingDirectory="$(SolutionRoot)"

        Command="$(TF) checkin /comment:"Build script auto update" /noprompt /override:"Build script auto update" "$(SourceMonitorProjectFile)"" />

    <!-- Run xslt batch file against xml or anything here… --> 

</Target>

Note: If you install Source Monitor to a non default location (or you are running on a 64 bit server like us) you must specify this using the ToolLocation attribute:

<SourceMonitor

    ToolLocation="C:\Program Files (x86)\SourceMonitor\" 

    ProjectFile="$(SourceMonitorProjectFile)"

    ...

    />

Download:

• Download the source to this post (VS2005) from here: MSBuildTask.zip (4.95 kb)