I am porting legacy code that is using the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client libraries to .NET 6 using the new client libraries (here).
I cannot work out what I need to do to mimic a simple "Get" operation.
With the old libraries, a project collection is created, a workspace mapped and then a full recursive get could be called for any path.
With the new libraries, the closest I can get is to obtain a TfvcHttpClient and call GetItemsAsync. But I can only specify one level of recursion and the call doesn't download the files.
I have been all over the client samples here but they only show how to enumerate through a list of items. I can't see anything that actually gets any source? The repo has been marked as read only now so I can't ask questions there.
Is there no way with the new client libraries of doing what was possible before i.e. the "get" of a source control folder with full recursion?
Can anyone point me in the direction of a sample that performs actual retrieval of source?
Related
i am new to Unity and i am try to understand plugins. I have got the difference between a managed plugin and a native plugin, but what is not very clear to me is:
what is the difference between a plugin and a dll? what should i expect to find in an sdk to make it usable in my unity project?
Thanks a lot
To expand on #Everts comment instead of just copying it into an answer, I'll go a little into details here
What is a plugin?
It's a somewhat vague word for a third-party library that is somehow integrated with the rest of your game. It means that it neither is officialy supported by Unity, nor is it a part of your core code. It can be "plugged" in or out without altering its internals, so it must provide some kind of API that can be used by the game code.
For example, you'll find many plugins that handle external services like ads, notifications, analytics etc. You'll also find a couple of developer-tools that can also be called plugins, like tile-based map editors and such.
Plugins come in many forms - DLL files are one example but some plugins actually provide full source code for easier use. And of course, other plugins will provide native code for different platforms, like Objective-C for iOS or .jars for Android.
So to answer your first question:
DLL is simply a pre-compiled source file that can be a part of a plugin
A plugin is a whole library that can consist of multiple files with different formats (.cs, .dll, .jar, .m etc)
What do you need to use an sdk?
First of all - documentation. Like I said before, and like you noticed yourself, not all plugins give you access to the source code. And unfortunately, not many sdks have extensive and developer-friendly documentations so it can be a tough task to actually understand how to use a given sdk.
Secondly - the code. Many sdks give you some kind of "drag & drop" library, a single folder with all the neccessary files inside that you simply add to your Unity projects. I've also seen sdks that use Unity packages that you have to import via Assets > Import Package > Custom Package.
Once you have the code and documentation it's time to integrate it with your game. I strongly recommend using an abstract lyer in your game as, in my experience, you often have to change sdks for various reasons and you don't want to rewrite your game logic every time. So I suggest encapsulating sdk-related code in a single class so that you have to change only one class in your code when switching from, say, one ad provider to another (and keep the old class in case you need to switch back).
So you basically need three things:
Documentation (either a readme file or an online documentation)
The code (precompiled or source)
A versatile integration
I have a large application to manage consisting of of three or four executables and as many as fifty .dlls. Many of the source code files are shared across many of the projects.
The problem is a familiar one to many of us - if I change some source code I want to be able to identify which of the binaries will change and, therefore, what it is appropriate to retest.
A simple approach would be simply to compare file sizes. That is an 80% acceptable solution, but there is at least a theoretical possibility of missing something. Secondly, it gives me very little indication as to WHAT has changed; It would be ideal to get some form of report on this so I can then filter out irrelevant (e.g. dates/versions copyrights etc..)
On the plus side :
all my .dcus are in a row - I mean they are all built into a single folder
the build is controlled by a script (.bat)(easy, for example, to emit .obj files if that helps)
svn makes it easy to collect together any (two) revisions for comparison
On the minus side
There is no policy to include all used units in all projects; some units get included because they are on a search path.
Just knowing that a changed unit is used/compiled by a project is not sufficient proof that the binary is affected.
Before I begin writing some code to solve the problem I would like to ask the panel what suggestions they might have as to how to approach this.
The rules of StackOverflow forbid me to ask for recommended software, but if anyone has any positive experiences of continuous integration tools that would help - great
I am open to any suggestion or observation that is relevant in this context.
It seems to me that your question boils down to knowing which units are contained in your various executables. Since you are using search paths, it will be hard for you to work this out ahead of time. The most robust way to find out is to consult the .map file that the compiler emits. This contains a list of all units contained in your executable.
Once you know which units are contained in each executable, you need to know whether or not anything has changed in those units. That information is contained in your revision control system. Put this all together and you have the information that you need.
Of course, just because the source code for a unit has changed, you might argue that re-testing is not needed. Perhaps the only change made was the version, or the date in a copyright label or some such. But it is asking too much to be able to ask a computer to make such a judgement. At some point you need a human to step up and take responsibility.
What is odd about this though is that you are asking the question at all. It seems to me to be enormously risky to attempt partial testing. I cannot understand why you don't simply retest the entire product.
After using it for > 10 years for commercial in-house and freelancer work in large projects, I can recommend to try Apache Ant. It is a build tool which supports dependencies, and has many very helpful features.
Apache Ant also integrates nicely with CI tools such as Hudson/Jenkins, Bamboo etc.
Another suggestion - based on experience with Maven - is to design the general software architecture as modular as possible. If modules (single or multiple source or DCU files in one directory) use a version number in the directory name as a version number, it is possible to control exactly how application are composed from these modules.
If you want to program such a tool yourself the approach would be something like this:
First you need to detect wheter there were any changes made to seperate source files. As you already figured out comparing the file size is bad idea as the file size can stay the same despite lots of changes made to it (as long as there is same amount of text in pas file its size won't change). So instead you could check the last modification time for specific file or create some hash value like MD5 hash for comparison (can be quite slow).
Then you need to generate yourself a dependancy tree which will tell you which files are used for which project/subproject.
Finally based on changes detected in seperate files you check the dependancy tree to see which projects needs to be recompiled.
The problem of such approach is that you would probably have to update the dependancy tree manually each time when new unit is added to the project or an existing one is removed from the project.
But the best way would be to go and use some version controll software istead of reinventing the wheel. I myself like the way how GIT works and I belive that with proper implementation of GIT into the project mannager itself could be quite powerfull do to GIT support of branching/subbranching (each project is its own branch, each version of your software can be its own subbranch).
Now latest version of Delphi does have GIT integration done though SVN but this unfortunately limits some of best GIT functionality. So if you maybe decide to go and integrate GIT support directly into Delphi I'm first in line to use it.
We are currently moving over a large website to DotNetNuke (version 7.2.1). We're creating separate projects for each module and skin, source controlled in TFS. We were not planning on adding the actual DNN source code itself to TFS. I would like to be able to access common files, such as JS and CSS, among different solution/projects. Is there a recommended way to do this without source controlling the DNN source code project itself?
You could create local Nuget packages? :D That might be overkill for such a scenario.
You could always create a single project/module, that all the other modules reference the path for the original resources, so that they all point to the same location.
If you don't want to add any DNN related source in TFS, it means that you have to setup a identical structure on the disk and in IIS. Then in your ascx/css files you can use URIs that are either relative to your disk structure or your dev website.
If you create a specific project for the resources, you will put parts of the DNN codebase in your TFS. If it is not a showstopper for you, consider adding the elements to the solution instead, since there is no logical partitioning of these resources as a project. I would however recommend using URIs.
As a side note, please refer to the Client Resource Management API of DNN for your future devs in order to benefit from the minification and combination of resources.
I need to make an app that will let users select some options, click a button, and a separate compiled app is created. Is this possible? I am using delphi 7 and 2010.
Thanks for the replies. Here is a little more info.
It would have to be a graphical app and create a graphical app.
What I want is the user to fire up 'App A' (I originally made), be able to select some options (I apologize for the secrecy. I think this is a million dollar idea that probably 3 people may find useful :) then use the program to create 'App B.' 'App B' can then be distributed to end users and 'App B' is a single executable that includes a compiled app plus the configuration data. I don't care how, but I need 'App B' to be a single executable.
I wouldn't even need to use Delphi for the final compiled app. If there is some sort of "pseudo-compiler" that I can call from Delphi that would marry a precompiled exe and a separate config file into a single executable. That would work just fine as well.
Thank you for the replies and help.
Thank you.
I also faced a similar situation once. I had to produce an exe using my exe. I didn't want to go the compiling a source code because of complexity and license problems.
Lets call the parent app P and child app C. Also lets assume that whatever option C needs can be summed up in a config file (XML/INI etc). What I ended-up doing was:
Create P and C. Inserted C in resource data of P.
When user clicked the button after selecting options, P would extract C from its resource data.
Created an XML file containing the options selected by user and inserted it in C's resource data.
So whenever C will run, it will use the options given in the XML file stuffed in it. It looks like complicated and hacky but is reliable and simple. Do a google on "delphi embedding resource in exe" and you will find plenty of articles to do above.
It is possible. You will need a Delphi 7 (or compatible) compiler (command line at least) on the target machine. You will also need all the source code for the compiled application and that includes all the third party libraries if you use any.
When you have it all set just call the command line compiler (DCC32.EXE) with the proper parameters and paths.
You can use two approaches for this:
Call ShellExecute
Call CreateProcess
You will have more control over the execution with CreateProcess. Also you will have to watch out for legal issues and licences if you plan to use the compiler this way.
Given that the Delphi compiler can't be redistributed, one solution if the user has not a copy of Delphi may be to use a script engine (i.e. RemObjects PascalScript, but there are others), generate code for it, and embed that code (i.e. within a resource) in an executable that will execute it when launched.
Create a separate stub executable that implements all the logic you need, and that reads its configuration from its own local resources (look at the TResourceStream class to help you load a resource at runtime).
Include that stub executable as an RCDATA resource in your main app's resources when it is compiled.
At runtime, the main app can extract the stub executable from its resources when needed, save it to disk, and insert the necessary configuration data into the stub's resources using the Win32 API UpdateResource() function.
Without knowing more about why you think you need to do this, I assume you don't actually need to do this. Given the stated requirements, I'd simply have one app, written in Delphi, that looks for the existence of configuration data (.ini file, registry, etc..) In the absence of this, it presents a screen that "will let users select some options, click a button". Then the options are stored in a .ini file, and the rest of the program proceeds, making use of those options.
Alternately, I'd use some pascal scripting, such as provided by TMS.
If you are looking for a way to crank out custom-branded versions of an app, maybe use Inno Setup with a ResHacker step. i.e. gather requirements in Inno, spit out your .exe into a temp directory, use ResHacker to modify the .exe, copy it into the program folder.
I have an Application that is based on loaded test programs, saved as text-based files in a specific user data folder. All fine. A client has just commented that they would like to have full traceability of changes to such test programs (for ISO9001 etc) and it occured to me that I could provide some kind of checkout / commit mechanism alongside the existing file load / save but which targetted a VCS (say SVN). The problem is that although I use Tortoise SVN for my own development, I've no idea how to write a simple program in Delphi to programmatically access SVN. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
You may want to look at the source code to DelphiSVN it's an OpenTool API application that integrates SVN into the Delphi IDE.
The SvnClient.pas in that project looks like an excellent way to call the SVN API
with the low level wrapper for the API in svn_client.pas
Using the SVN APIs seems like a good starting point.
Presumably you could also call the binaries directly e.g.
system( "svn checkout something" );
Although the simplest that appraoch should be avoided if at all possible.