I’m a big fan of Console – it’s a nifty little app that lets you host multiple disparate command prompts in a single tabbed interface. I have a regular command prompt, a Git bash, a Powershell prompt and a Python … Continue reading →
There's some really impressive stuff happening in the .NET Community lately. Folks are reaching outside their standard built-in tools and pulling inspiration from everywhere. It's been said that (some) Microsoft developers don't like to use…
Reading the TFS 2010 Branching Guide on CodePlex (no, I’m not a glutton for punishment, just want to know what else is going on in the world), I found an interesting note on scratch or temporary branches that pretty much … Continue reading →
I’ve used a few different task schedulers on my current project, where I have to kick off NServiceBus sagas at very specific times of day (every night at 2AM etc.) We started out using the built-in Windows Task Scheduler, which … Continue reading →
We’re getting ready for the next version of MvcConf on Tuesday, 2/8/2011 from 8AM-5PM CST! What is MvcConf? MvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. Your brain will expl…
There are lots of editors that can view large XML files, such as Visual Studio, Notepad++, UltraEdit and so on. But all of these have one flaw – they try and do too much in viewing XML. Things like coloring, expand/collapse widgets and so…
Using Solution Factory inside of NuPack opens up a great new world of creating Solution Level templates. Previously, I wrote a lot of code in Solution Factory that just kept running into edge cases working against the Visual Studio automation API ,DTE….
Back in the day, I used to develop scheduled tasks by writing my own task scheduler and batch execution program. I don’t think at the time I knew about the Task Scheduler service built in to Windows. It support just about any scheduling algorithm I could throw at it, outside of building dependent or cascading tasks.
For build automation, I often want to create, stop and start these scheduled tasks. Luckily, there’s a handy command-line tool to do so: schtasks.exe. Not only can you administer tasks on your own machine, but other machines as well. This is perfect for build and deployment automation, where I need to not only copy files, but execute SQL migration scripts, start/stop services, and power down/up scheduled tasks.
The command-line tool lets you do quite a few things:
I typically don’t create the tasks, as that really only needs to happen once. However, it would be fairly trivial for me to do so, and have all of the task setup driven through automation.
One thing I like to do is disable batch jobs before the deployment happens, then turn them all back on. I don’t want to do this with all the tasks there, so I use NAnt to pull from a text file of the scheduled tasks I’m interested in. However, I don’t want to disable running tasks, as I want to just let them finish and have the build stop:
<echo message="Disabling batch jobs..." /> <foreach item="Line" in="batchjobs.txt" property="taskName"> <exec program="schtasks.exe" commandline="/Query /TN ${taskName} /FO TABLE /NH" output="task.txt" /> <loadfile file="task.txt" property="batchjob.info" /> <exec program="schtasks.exe" commandline="/CHANGE /TN ${taskName} /DISABLE" if="${string::contains(batchjob.info, 'Ready')}"/> </foreach>
In this NAnt snippet, I loop through the batch jobs I care about. I then call the “schtasks.exe”, querying the tasks status by name and outputting the result in the form of a table to a “task.txt” file. Next, I load that file into a NAnt property. Finally, I use the “/CHANGE” switch to disable the scheduled task, but ONLY IF its status is “Ready” and not “Running” or something else.
Next, I’ll run through the batch jobs file again, this time querying for any task that hasn’t been disabled. If there are any, I’ll just fail the build. I could sleep the build script, and poll until the task completes.
Once the build is done, I’ll enable all the configured scheduled tasks:
<echo message="Enabling batch jobs..." /> <foreach item="Line" in="batchjobs.txt" property="taskName"> <exec program="schtasks.exe" commandline="/CHANGE /TN ${taskName} /ENABLE" /> </foreach>
Build automation can really cut down on those launch-night headaches and uncertainty. Having a good command-line tool goes a long way to enabling easy build automation scripts.
One of the essential development tools (found on Hanselman’s tools list) is a better command shell. The regular “cmd.exe” that comes with every version of Windows is quite lame. Console offers a host of improvements over the build-in command prompt, not least of which is the tabbed interface, allowing me to have one Console window with tabs for different directories/shells.
Another cool feature of Console is that you can host different shell configurations. And since the git bash is build on top of cmd.exe, it’s pretty straightforward to plug the git bash into Console.
First things first, make sure you have msysgit installed. You can find the installation instructions from Jason’s Git for Windows Developers series. Next, you’ll need to install Console, which you can download from the SourceForge site.
After launching Console, we’ll need to add a new tab launcher by navigating to Edit->Settings:
In the Settings window that pops up, click the “Tabs” section, then the “Add” button to add a new Tab:
This will bring up the settings for the new tab you created. In the configuration options in the “Main” tab below, I use the following settings (without quotes):
I installed Git to the “C:\Program Files (x86)\Git” directory, so this might be different on your machine. The Icon setting is not necessary, but it’s nice to see the Git icon in a tab for differentiation. Click “OK” and you can now create a new Git tab:
You now have a git bash in a tabbed interface, letting you keep multiple git bashes/command prompts around at once in a nice tabbed interface:
You can add tabs for other kinds of command prompts, such as the Visual Studio command prompt (with the correct PATH variables set) and so on. Next up is trying out posh-git…
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