RSS and SourceSafe
June 25th, 2003 by gregr
Hot out of the RAI lab…RSS feeds generated from Visual SourceSafe. Many development shops use some kind of email notification for source changes – and this is a perfect application of RSS. Here’s a screen shot in NewsGator with Outlook 2003:
This currently runs as a Windows service, and periodically generates the RSS file(s). To get it running, do the following:
1. Download (msi or zip) and install the service. When you install, make sure you enter in a user account that has permission to access the directories where your VSS data lives.
2. Edit the config.xml file in the installation directory. It should be pretty self-explanatory.
3. Start the service from the service control manager.
Post comments here – I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also, I’m not sure what the final disposition of this code will be (free, part of another product, etc.)…so this build will expire on August 1.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2003 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 26th, 2003 at 8:09 am
Will this work with Outlook 2002?
June 26th, 2003 at 8:32 am
Sure! It’s a “regular” RSS feed…so it will work with any aggregator. It was just a good opportunity to throw in another screen shot of NewsGator with Outlook 2003. :-)
June 26th, 2003 at 9:44 am
Ok.. I installed it and I *think* I got it configured and started correctly… but I can’t see that it’s actually doing anything. What should I be looking for, besides the XML file gettting created?
June 26th, 2003 at 9:51 am
I should really learn to be more patient… It just took a minute to produce the feed. Very cool!
Is there any way I can configure it to only display checkins by a particular user?
June 26th, 2003 at 10:01 am
What are the units for the Interval element (hours?, minutes?, days?)
June 26th, 2003 at 10:06 am
You can’t configure for a particular user’s activity – seems like a good idea, though. I’ll add it in.
And the interval units are in minutes.
July 1st, 2003 at 3:21 pm
Pretty cool! Greg Reinacker has a Windows service that generates an RSS feed from updates to a Visual Source Safe database. I haven’t given it a try yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a pretty cool program to help in allowing groups of individuals working on a project to keep track of updates across the development team!…[more]
July 2nd, 2003 at 8:54 am
Since I am having setup problems, how about an entry with some diagnostic info?
July 10th, 2003 at 11:18 am
I did something similar with the Mantis bug tracking software http://mantisbt.sf.net/ to create RSS feeds of the current bugs/issues we’re tracking.
July 15th, 2003 at 1:01 pm
When it shows items which have been deleted, it only shows the directory, and not the file name of the file. Any way around that?
July 15th, 2003 at 1:34 pm
Eric – yeah, that’s annoying isn’t it! This info is actually not exposed via the VSS API (there’s a KB article somewhere talking about it). We’ll eventually add some more code to scan for differences and provide this information…no ETA on that yet.
August 5th, 2003 at 9:13 am
The original code I had postedto generate RSS feeds from a VSS database has expired…[more]
October 31st, 2003 at 4:08 pm
Yet again, the code I posted to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe has expired…I’ve posted a new version that…[more]
November 3rd, 2003 at 6:35 am
I had problems (“The account name is invalid or does not exist”) installing on a W2000 system.
I changed the windows username to machinename\username and it installed properly.
November 3rd, 2003 at 9:10 am
VSS in RSS is a great idea, but not as a Windows NT Service. Why not create an ASHX IHttpHandler which collects changes from the VSS database upon request and use caching to limit the burdon on the database to once every 10 minutes? The QueryString can be used to determine parameters.
November 3rd, 2003 at 9:21 am
Victor, I originally had the same thought…but there are some security-related issues that make that solution less than ideal. Can you elaborate on why you don’t like it as a Windows service?
December 5th, 2003 at 11:22 am
You mention that other shops use email notification. Do you know how to setup this, or know who does? Thanks
December 5th, 2003 at 12:32 pm
No, I don’t…but you might try google for “sourcesafe email notification” or something along those lines.
May 8th, 2004 at 7:27 pm
omg, this rocks. i’ve tried some lame email notification software for the same purpose (cryptomonkey and a couple others), but they don’t watch an entire VSS tree — you have to enter each file one at a time! And RSS just makes so much more sense. Can’t believe this is free. You rock. I’m gonna send all my friends here.
May 13th, 2004 at 1:00 pm
Hi Greg,
Great idea! I can’t seem to get it to work, though. When I start the service, this message is written to the Event Log and an xml feed is never written to disk:
Exception occurred generating RSS.
VSS Database: D:\vss\srcsafe.ini
VSS Project: $/workbench/generator/current
Exception:
The specified module could not be found.
at VssRssSvc.GenRss.BuildRss(String srcSafeIniPath, String vssUser, String vssPass, String projectName, String outputPath, Int32 maxItems, Boolean recursive)
Any ideas?
Thanks very much…
June 1st, 2004 at 2:40 pm
I have installed your app, configured the XML, setup the service and it finally produced an XML feed. There seems to be an issue, there are no new XML feeds only the original, I have the interval set to 60 and nothing happens. The VSS base is quite big, we have 15 developers working on a lot of projects, could it be timing out. Also since the install we are getting random locks on some of our files. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
June 23rd, 2004 at 4:24 pm
I’ve tried installing this on Win 2000 and Win XP. After it asks for a username and password, I always get the response that the account does not exist or the password is wrong, even after double and tripple checking the account and password. Any ideas??? I’ve written and installed .NET services in the past, but have always used the account “localsystem” in the service installer.
June 24th, 2004 at 12:10 am
This is an excellent example. Thank you!
Really makes you think!
July 14th, 2004 at 9:52 am
Greg,
You’re program is amazing. However, I am experiencing problems getting it to connect and run with a db that is installed on a Novell server. Below is the msg captured from my event log:
Exception occurred generating RSS.
VSS Database: \\server1\net_1\vss\sourcesafe\srcsafe.ini
VSS Project: $/
Exception:
The SourceSafe database path admin does not exist. Please select another database.
at SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSDatabaseClass.Open
(String SrcSafeIni, String Username, String Password)
at VssRssSvc.GenRss.BuildRss(String srcSafeIniPath,
String vssUser, String vssPass, String projectName,
String outputPath, Int32 maxItems, Boolean recursive)
Is this caused by the fact that I am trying to get it to connect to Novell db (I have admin privelages to both the local machine and Netware server).
Here is my config file:
1
\\Server1\NET_1\VSS\SourceSafe\srcsafe.ini
jwhite
omitted
$/
true
S:\inetpub\wwwroot\dept\scm\rss\vss.xml
250
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
Any help would greatly be appreciated?
July 14th, 2004 at 9:55 am
Greg,
You’re program is amazing. However, I am experiencing problems getting it to connect and run with a db that is installed on a Novell server. Below is the msg captured from my event log:
Exception occurred generating RSS.
VSS Database: \\server1\net_1\vss\sourcesafe\srcsafe.ini
VSS Project: $/
Exception:
The SourceSafe database path admin does not exist. Please select another database.
at SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSDatabaseClass.Open
(String SrcSafeIni, String Username, String Password)
at VssRssSvc.GenRss.BuildRss(String srcSafeIniPath,
String vssUser, String vssPass, String projectName,
String outputPath, Int32 maxItems, Boolean recursive)
Is this caused by the fact that I am trying to get it to connect to Novell db (I have admin privelages to both the local machine and Netware server).
Here is my config file:
1
\\Server1\NET_1\VSS\SourceSafe\srcsafe.ini
jwhite
omitted
$/
true
S:\inetpub\wwwroot\dept\scm\rss\vss.xml
250
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
Any help would greatly be appreciated?
August 16th, 2004 at 12:07 pm
I’m interested in this but I can’t get past the install… keeps insisting the username+password I give it for the service are incorrect (“either account doesn’t exist or password is incorrect”). But they are definitely correct ones. One wrinkle is that we use Novell here… I wonder if that has any effect? Hmm…
August 17th, 2004 at 9:22 am
Solved my own problem by consulting one of the other posts about this tool… needed to put the username in as domain\username.
September 19th, 2004 at 7:05 pm
a
November 9th, 2004 at 7:52 am
I am stuck half way in an install.
It keeps telling me that “The specified service has been marked for deletion”. Then the installation stops.
Any ideas where in the registry I could find the service to delete it?
Thanks
Mathias
November 22nd, 2004 at 11:38 am
I while back, I wrote an application to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe databases. The code was set to expire…[more]
November 22nd, 2004 at 11:45 pm
Excellent! A great way to get an RSS feed that you can use to track what other developers are doing to your code base! From RSS and SourceSafe .: QUOTE I while back, I wrote an application to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe databases….[more]
January 12th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Download links doesn’t work any more.
April 22nd, 2005 at 5:50 am
Download links still not working
October 10th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
Download link above is broken. Can you point me to the correct download link. thanks
January 9th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Will this work with VSS 7?
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:05 am
For those who the link is broken, go to the post from Greg titled RSS and SourceSafe on 11/22/2004. He’s got a link in that post to the source code where you can download the source.