Spruce 1.1 released

I've just released a new minor version of Spruce - my open source ASP.NET MVC project for Team Foundation Server. The minor increment fixes a few issues, but also (barring bug fixes) ends the development cycle of the project. I'm not planning on adding any new features or support for new work items to Spruce in the future. It's now got support for MS Agile's Bugs, Tasks, Issue work items and doesn't support the other three work items.

I'm hoping we get a pleasant surprise with the next version of Team Foundation Server, with a UI that moves away from the awful Office/OWA style to something that matches modern DVC websites, like you find with Github, Bitbucket and to some degree Codeplex. Infact if they shipped the Codeplex interface with TFS it would be an improvement. I know Microsoft were recruiting for WPF developers for their TFS team so there's promise there, but they're behind the whole Ruby/Google/Amazon/Git/NoSQL crowd in establishing their presence in the format of a diverse online toolset for developers. You get MSDN.com and the MVC team's efforts and that's about it. Appharbor.com and TeamBuild Server are examples of holes that have been plugged by other companies when Microsoft themselves could probably produce an awesome product, instead of being stuck in the early noughties Winforms world and flogging the dead Silverlight horse.

Anyway ranting aside, Spruce can be found at Codeplex.

A new Spruce UI, a big refactor and a release candidate!

It’s been roughly a year since I started the Spruce project, back in November 2010. Over the course of a year it’s had a lot of hold-ups and could be mistaken for yet another open source project where the author excitedly starts the project and then ditches it after about 3 beta releases. It’s also understandably not had much interest – I would guess that small .NET/C++ teams generally use Fogbugz, JIRA and other web-based bug and task tracking tools, while larger teams will either use TFS with the CMMI project type or the Scrum dashboards via tools like Urban Turtle and the Scrum Dashboard, or just Visual Studio.

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Using Spruce on a different web server from TFS

One of the big issues I’ve come up against when developing Spruce has been using the website on a different web server from the one TFS runs as. By default TFS creates itself as ‘Team Foundation Server’ as a separate site inside IIS. As its API is entirely web services based, this is where your calls are made to, the .NET assemblies simply wrap these HTTP calls up in an easy to use package.

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TFS Template types

One of the main features of using TFS for bug and backlog tracking is the power it gives you to edit work item templates. A work item is simply a bag of properties/fields grouped together, like a class in C#/Java/every other OO language. You can customise these fields, and you also get a set of core fields, but you also get to choose the workflow of each field. For example you can’t set a bug to closed, before it’s been resolved.

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A brand new Spruce filter UI (that I then made redundant)

After feedback from both developers and non-developers in my company about the current filter UI in Spruce, it was obviously time to ditch it. It was failure #2 in my attempt at creating a simpler way of showing TFS’s vast set of work item options.

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Three months later in Spruce…

Not much has changed on this blog since March, no new posts have appeared. The main reason for this has been, amongst other things, my focus being shifted towards another FOSS project I’ve been doing called Roadkill Wiki. It’s a .NET wiki engine which I wrote to take the place of Screwturn. The primary motivator for this was that Screwturn had fairly poor Windows auth support, and used its own Wiki syntax. Roadkill addresses both of these, supporting Markdown, Media Wiki and Creole syntaxes and allows you to import from a Screwturn database.

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The new Spruce solution structure

I’m quite anally retentive when it comes to folder structure in Visual Studio projects: I like to keep all C# source and site assets in a structured way that will avoid me having to spend (accumulated) hours doing pointless searches and treasure hunts through the solution explorer...

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Supported search syntax in Spruce

For anyone reading the blog you may be wondering and be slightly bemused as to why there’s so many blog posts and yet such a painstaking pace to the source code checkins. The main reason for this is I want to save myself the slightly boring documenting task (that many open source projects neglect) that will come later by doing it in small chunks now. The plan is to to use these blog posts as the core material for the documentation and also explain some of the design decisions.

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Spruce: From Irony.NET to GoldParser

In the last post I was all geared up and ready to write my search engine parser with the Irony framework. As has happened a fews times to me in with searching out solutions with development, shortly after writing the post I stumbled upon Gold Parser and Calitha.

I’m not usually that fickle with frameworks that I’ll ditch one straight away, however Gold Parser was exactly what I was looking for originally, that ANTLR failed to provide.

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Starting on Spruce's irony-powered search parser

After a few months off to eat a lot of food, I’m returning to do more dev work on Spruce.

Picking up where I left off, the first “subsystem” I’m focusing on is the search. The UI and search I have in mind is fairly simple, but also powerful. I’m aiming to keep it google-esque in its search results and allow you to search the important fields of a work item, plus its core fields.

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