Ross plugged in

AtlasCamp

Ross Rowe — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:39:17 +0000

This year’s AtlasCamp is fast approaching, and if you haven’t already registered, you’d better hurry up!

AtlasCamp isn’t a boring junket where you sit through endless PowerPoint presentations, it’s fast paced and hands on with lots of coding and technical sessions.

I was fortunate enough to attend last year’s AtlasCamp, and I found it to be a fantastic experience. It was enlightening to hear from some of the top plugin developers in person about their thoughts and ideas for how they can make Atlassian’s already great products even better.

I learnt an awful lot in a short space of time, and came away with a greater appreciation for both the creativity of the developers and the extent to which Atlassian has opened up their products so that third party add ons can be easily integrated.

My main interest is in developing plugins for Bamboo, Fisheye and Crucible, and I fortunate enough to talk to both Edwin and Brendan from Atlassian, who gave me some great feedback on both some of the plugins I’ve written and also ideas I had for future plugins.

I think attending AtlasCamp would be valuable for non-developers too…if you’ve got a great idea for a plugin or new feature, come have a chat to one of the Atlassians at the Developer Office Hours. They can let you know how feasible your idea is, and give you pointers on the best way to go about implementing it.

It’s also a terrific opportunity to find out what’s in store for Atlassian’s products in the future.

One of the main reasons that I’ve been developing plugins over the last couple of years is that it allows me to explore technology sets that otherwise I might not get to play with. Being able to run ideas past both Atlassian and other plugin developers is a great way for me to get valuable advice and feedback. Personally, I’m really looking forward to hearing about how I can develop plugins using Gadgets! Plus I’ll get to hear how I did in this year’s Codegeist competition.

I found the event to be a great way to talk to the other Atlassians/plugin developers in person. A lot of the communication I’ve had with people has been over email or IM, and it’s always nice to talk face to face! There was a great sense of camaraderie from everyone there, and I’m really looking forward to seeing both old and new faces and hopefully learning a thing or two!

Bamboo on the iPhone…soon

Ross Rowe — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:23:19 +0000

I’ve been working on a Bamboo application on the iPhone…here’s some screenshots of what I’ve got so far. I’m just trying to finish off a few things, but hopefully it’ll be available on the app store soon. If you’ve got any suggestions or requests, please let me know!

what’s been happening?

Ross Rowe — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:47:28 +0000

Well, I’ve been making a couple of minor bug fixes here and there, so new versions of the Bamboo Cobertura, Crucible ClearCase and Bamboo NAnt Builder .NET Support have been released. I’ve also been harrassing Atlassian to make the Fisheye source code management pluggable so that I can write a ClearCase plugin for Fisheye, but that’s still ongoing;)

I’ve mainly been working on the first of hopefully several commercially-licenced plugins, the first of which being a BlackBerry-optimized theme for Confluence (which is available now in beta version) and a Confluence QualityCentre plugin (which will be released very soon).

I’m in the process of setting up avainit.com to handle issue tracking, blog posts and general information, so once it’s up and running, this blog will move over there.

Building Visual C++ with Bamboo as a service

Ross Rowe — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:59:42 +0000

A user reported a tricky bug with the NAnt Builder…running an NAnt build when Bamboo runs as a service would end up with a error on the import of the msxml libraries, wheras running Bamboo via the console would be fine.

Turns out that when msbuild runs as a service, it doesn’t have the full path available, so adding the updating the solution options in Visual Studio (Tools menu > Options >
Project and Solutions > VC++ Directories) to ensure that

$(SystemRoot)
$(SystemRoot)\System32
$(SystemRoot)\System32\wbem

are specified before the rest of the entries fixes the problem.

Bamboo ClearCase plugin updates

Ross Rowe — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:05:49 +0000

I’ve updated the Bamboo ClearCase plugin to include two new features.

The first is to leverage the work that Magnus and Thobias did in including support for Base ClearCase into the plugin, such that the ClearCase UCM support can handle both baseline comparisons as well as date comparisons…this means that projects which don’t use baselines can use the plugin to compare changes since the last build date.

The second is to include support for building projects that use Dynamic views…this was actually pretty straightforward, I just needed to find the right syntax for the view creation.

Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V suck

Ross Rowe — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:56:36 +0000

Well, no sooner had I released version 1.0.5 of the Tagger plugin did someone find a critical defect. Unfortunately, 2 instances of the comment text field had made their way into the configuration page, so when the config was saved, an ArrayList was stored instead of a String. And because Bamboo was expecting only Strings to be present, a nasty ClassCastException occurred.

Happily, this should now be fixed in version 1.0.6…

Updates to the Bamboo Tagger plugin

Ross Rowe — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:03:56 +0000

I’ve made a couple of modifications to the Tagger Plugin in the last couple of days.

Firstly, I updated the plugin to allow the customization of the comment text used for the Subversion tags…previously it was hard coded to ‘Automatic copy from Bamboo’, but the text can now be specified on a plan’s configuration. You can also use replacement parameters so that the jira issues or original Subversion commit comments can be included in the tag commit comments.

I also updated the CVS component of the plugin to use either ‘rtag’ or ‘tag’ – previously it was just using ‘rtag’.

I’ve also done some more work on the integration tests for the plugin. I’m using the integration testing functionality provided by the Atlassian PDK, which deploys the plugin to a local instance of Bamboo, and I’ve got a test that uses JWebUnit to programatically click links. At the moment, the test is only verifying that the UI components included in the plugin exist.

Hello world!

Ross Rowe — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:17:32 +0000

This is my blog about some of the plugins I’ve developed for a bunch of Atlassian products. The plugins that I’ve developed and/or support include:

Phew! If you use any of these plugins, then you might want to subscribe to this blog, as I’ll be posting about any updates I make to the plugins.