Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Visual SourceSafe and RSS

I was looking for a way for Visual SourceSafe to tell me that someone has checked in changed files. I found SSMonitor (email notification) and Visual SourceSafe Journal Monitor Service (email, IM, or custom) but it was VSS RSS Generator that really delivered a great solution: an RSS feed that listed the check-in changes.

VSS RSS Generator runs as a Windows service (nice) but it's very CPU intensive (not nice), consuming about 1.5 minutes of CPU time per database per run. And I had to change some code in the inner foreach loop to reduce the memory footprint from 150MB to 15MB. But in general, it works very well.

The company I work for uses Bugzilla to track bugs and enhancements. In the check-in comments, we post either the bug number or a URL to the bug like: http://bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1186. The next step is to autodetect these URLs and reformat to make them clickable from within an RSS reader.

I wonder if anyone else has taken the VSS RSS Generator's source and improved it? If so, we should talk. Drop me an email, please...

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Kevin,

I'd love to see the changes that you made to the VSS RSS Service. We have a large VSS base which seems to make the RSS feed process for days. We've never actually got it to work - it just max's out the CPU and then dies a few days later.

Will you share?

Thanks in advance.

mike

3/30/2005 3:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh yeah, you can e-mail me at mm53bar [at] hotmail.com.

Thanks...mike.

3/30/2005 3:05 PM  
Blogger Kevin G. said...

I'd be glad to share my changes. In fact, I emailed my changes to Greg Reinacker (the original author) but he hasn't released an updated version yet. Either that or my changes didn't work for him!

3/30/2005 3:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, as Greg Reinacker said it, it's an unrestricted modification and redistribution license. So, you're free to release your modification to community.

I'm not sure, but it would seem that there is a possible memory leak at GenRss.cs, line 95: the ver object isn't release...

1/08/2006 7:50 PM  
Blogger Kevin G. said...

Yes, that's a memory leak. I just posted a diff of my changes here .

1/08/2006 8:57 PM  

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