Doodle Graphics

I thought I'd start a new series focusing on what I'm currently working on - Tridion from SDL.

The key thing I'm trying to solve at the moment is the deployment of work from one environment to another - initially one developer machine to another, then onto a shared build/deployment setup, then on through QA, User Acceptance Testing and onto live.

We've already done similar things with SharePoint, so we have a baseline of what we're trying to achieve, so it shouldn't be completely impossible.

Seeing as we're working on our C# code, CSS, JavaScript, etc in Visual Studio, tracking our tasks and bugs in TFS, and a build process built around this that takes these assets, compiles them, and generates some scripts to be run on the various environments to deploy them, we felt we'd like to try and utilise this for Tridion elements as well.

The first thing we tried, apparently the "recommended" way, was to use Content Porter. We wanted to prepare a "base" image that we could easily roll out to developers to start working on. We spent the better part of two days trying to break down the solution into small enough packages that we could reliably import them without it throwing an error and rolling back the last hours attempt.

We felt that not only was this frustrating, but also it wouldn't scale nicely - it relies on the developers remembering exactly what they've changed, manually exporting them out with CP - I'm sure it's possible but it does leave a large margin of error.

What we came up with was the following "ideal plan", following a standard "Good, Better Best" approach:

We've started this, and hit our first stumbling block - some content appears to be coming back from webdav as UTF8, while some it coming back as UTF16 - which seems to be confusing TFS when doing a check in, throwing up an error such as:

Visual Studio

z:\300 Design\Building Blocks\System\btn_conference.gif.gif: TF203083: The checksum value of the file that you uploaded does not match the provided value.

Which generally went away if I tried to check the file in a second time.

This seems to be more of a problem with TFS than Tridion or WebDav - an old post from Buck Hodges "How TFS Version Control determines a file's encoding" seems to hint at difficulties with encoding, especially around:

Unfortunately, TFS does not support changing the encoding of a pending add.  If you need to do that, you will have to undo the pending add, and then re-add the file using the command line and specify the /type option.

We think we've found a solution - using a different mechanism to map the WebDav folder to a network drive seems to result in TFS seeing consistent encodings. so this feels like a good place to stop, and report back on progress later.

Filed under: TFS, Tridion

Update: There's now a "How-To" guide to Doodle Grouper 28/11/2011

Update: I've uploaded a newer version, for more details see: Doodle Grouper 1.0.0.3 Released 05/04/2011

So, with Seemic Desktop 2 hitting Beta this week, I thought I'd just let you all know that I've updated my plugin, Doodle Grouper to work with the current version.

Since the last version, talked about in "Playing with Seesmic Desktop", I've tidied up the interfaces a bit, so they are more in keeping with the main shell theme. This was actually a fairly simple process, as simple as binding the style of the ChildWindow declaration to the main theme:

<controls:ChildWindow x:Class="DoodleGrouper.View.TempModifyGroupWindow" [...]

                      Style="{StaticResource CustomMessageBox}">

And that's it, pretty much, nice, grey dialogs, with pretty buttons on them. The only other thing I had to do was ensure that the Foreground colours of my text blocks were white so that they showed up:

So to sum up the changes:

• The plugin now inherits the theme from the parent shell.
• Groups can be renamed.
• You can now add and remove users from a group - simple click on the Settings icon for a group, select the users you want to remove from the group, and press "Update", no additional tweets will be shown in that group, and next time you open Seesmic Desktop all their updates will be gone.
• You can add users to the group at any time, no need to wait for them to post - just add them in, and the next time they post they'll appear - ideal for those infrequent posters that you really want to flag up.

Next on my list to consider is a way to enable popup toast on a per-group basis.

This plugin has two main advantages over the "user lists" feature in Seemic:

1. It's not tied to just Twitter accounts - you can add Facebook and Google Buzz users in there too, in fact any account that shows posts on the "home" timeline should appear in the group timeline.
2. It will auto-update - Twitter lists don't (didn't? I've not tried them much recently) update automatically, because each one needs to be requested individually, and this will eat into your api usage quite quickly. As these are updated as posts arrive, they don't use up that precious resource.

If you want to get your hands dirty:

• The source - you'll need to update the references to the Seesmic.Sdp.* libraries.
• Doodle Grouper (a repeat of the link to the compiled plug-in from above)

As always, let me know how you get on with it.

Filed under: Plug-ins, Seesmic, Silverlight