Development

Bulk Issue Editing in Version 0.8

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT

One of the many requested features is bulk issue editing. In 0.8 this is now possible through the new issue list page shown below. After selecting the issues you would like to edit with the checkbox next to the issue you can select the edit properties button. You will then be shown a panel of the issue properties that you can set. Set the properties you wish to change and select save and your issues will be updated!

The second addition to the issue list is the ability to select individual columns to display in the issue list. This is stored per user in a cookie so when you come back to the application it will remember the selected columns and can be changed anytime.

Work continues on the 0.8 release and progress is steady, currently work is being done on the localization adding all text strings to the database. This will make it easier for users to translate to other languages through a seperate web page.

After that is complete focus will be put on subversion integration, storing an issues subversion revisions as a seperate tab on the issue detail screen and linking to a subversion repository. Some great work has been done here and it should not take long to add this into the application. I am a little hesitant to do full integration such as viewing diffs etc through BugNET since there are many nice web based subversion viewers out there but we will start small and expand later if people think it should be included.

In the next few days I will blog about how custom queries will function in 0.8, which is currently feature complete at the moment with the ability to also query custom fields and save your queries.

Stay tuned!

A look at project administration in BugNET 0.8

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:07:00 GMT

In BugNET 0.8 the project creation / administration has been vastly improved so that you may define many of the previously hardcoded values. Most notably these hard corded values were the status, resolutions, issue types and priorities. Although these values may work perfectly for some, it is not viable for all projects or issue tracking methods to be forced to use these.

With the new project administration functionality, you are now able to define virtually all values in the drop down lists. Below we can see the edit project screen where we are editing our Test Project and have chosen to edit the statuses for this project. In addition to adding, editing and deleting values you can choose an image for the value which will display on the issues list grid and are able to specify in which order they appear in the drop down list.

Adding the flexibility to define custom values for a project will ensure BugNET can handle custom issue tracking needs very easily. More to come!

The future of 0.7 and what is to come in 0.8

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:01:36 GMT

BugNET 0.7 is now entering a maintainence mode, which means that only bug fixes will be in subsequent 0.7 releases. All new features will be tackled in the upcoming 0.8 release which is well underway.

On the development front the solution will be upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 but will remain at version 2.0 of the .NET framework until the further adoption of 3.5 by online web hosts. I am hoping to get a preview version of 0.8 out sometime this month, which means I will not be focusing on upgrades from 0.7 to this new version until a later point.

Some features that are to come / already complete:

Parent / Child Issues
Redesigned add / edit issue page which now displays custom fields
Custom Queries(including custom fields) that can be saved
Ability to add custom priorities / status's / types etc.
The start of UI localization
Improvement of themes

Next Release Update

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:08:16 GMT

Some people may have noticed that the issue tracker at support.bugnetproject.com was upgraded to version 0.7.881 that has not yet been released to the public.

The next release is a bug fix release but there are a few more issues to complete that will delay this release for a short while. This combined with the recent Canadian thanksgiving holiday and myself getting ready for a vacation to Scotland has left me with no time to work on the remaining issues.

Expect the new release to be out at the end of the month or shortly into November after my vacation.

What's next?

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:32:02 GMT

It has been quite a while since I have given any updates but the project has not been idle.

Before we begin, just a quick note that the site may be down tomorrow August 16th, 2007 8pm EST for 3-4 hours due to my hosting provider having an outage.

There are many issues, new features and improvements to address and it seems new ones are reported almost daily. Over the last past while I have found time to complete some of these issues but also add some great improvements to the BugNET application.

Categories

One of the improvements I am sure is most welcome is categories can now be renamed from the administration area. In addition to this I have spent some time implementing the great extjs ajax framework to add a treeview that allows you to drag and drop nodes to different parent categories. Categories in both the administration area and the project summary are also now sorted alphabetically.

Time Estimation

Another lacking feature has been the ability to add a time estimate to an issue. This is now possible on the new issue screen and then can be updated on the issue details screen. Also added is the total time logged on an issue. Still to be completed will be an initial estimation so you can see how the estimate compares to the actual amount of time the issue took to complete.

Milestones

The project summary up until now has displayed the versions of the project and the count off issues for those versions. This has been confusing for most users as you often want to see issues to be completed. This has now been changed to display the "milestones" formally known as "fix for version" and the number of issues that are to be completed for that version.

Roadmap

The roadmap has also been updated to not display any milestones when all issues are closed or completed. It also now displays issues that are "unscheduled" or that are not assigned a milestone to be fixed in.

Layout Improvements

As always, layout improvements have been added to clean up the UI and add styling to give the interface a cleaner look.

Documentation

I have recently had some time to start filling in the documentation (finally , yes I know). To do this I had to fix a few bugs in the current dotnetnuke wiki module as well. I will try to fill in the documentation as best as possible over the next few release cycles.

Next Release

The next release will contain these updates and be out very soon, probably the end of this month. There will probably be one more bug fix release soon after to wrap up some outstanding bugs then the focus will move towards version 0.8 and some long awaited features such as localization and custom queries. The project roadmap has been updated in the documentation wiki.

Thank you to everyone for their continued support.

May Development Update

Sat, 26 May 2007 11:03:00 GMT

It has been a month since the last update, it is spring and the weather is nice. It has been hard to keep visual studio open for a decent amount of time lately but I have managed to fix a few major outstanding issues from the last release.

I will try to package these changes up very soon (within the week) and put out a new release to keep the application moving forward.

Edit

Recently DotNetNuke (DNN) has release their latest version of the Wiki Module. Currently this website is using the beta of that module but there is not a supported upgrade path to the new module which is a complete rewrite and contains much more funtionality. I will be looking at how , even if i have to cut and past to migrate to the new module so that we can start to really document the system and its features.

Thank you everyone for their support.

Stabilization release scheduled for the end of week

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:53:00 GMT

Look for a new version of the issue tracker by the weeks end. This release will mostly be a stabilization release that has 40 resolved issues so far that includes bugs that were reported from the 0.7.820 release. I expect to fix 1 or 2 more outstanding issues to add to this list as well.

There has been a lot of excellent activity in the issue tracker and in the forums in response to the 0.7.820 release. I thank all those that are reporting, discussing, fixing bugs or implementing new features.

For a full list of resolved issues so far please refer to the 0.7 Final version on the roadmap.

BugNET Goes Continuous!

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:59:00 GMT

I have taken the last few days to setup and implement Continuous Integration for the BugNET project. For those who are not familiar with this process please refer to this good article by Martin Fowler.

I am a big fan of this process and we have been using it where I work for sometime now. Setting it up for this project is part of my plan to shorten the release cycles and put some structure behind the development process. By implementing continuous integration and cruisecontrol.net there will always be deployable build and source packages, unit tested, documented and ready to go after each code check-in. Unfortunately these builds will not be made public at this time because cruisecontrol.net running on a local machine.

The other part of shortening release cycles will be to tackle less number of enhancements per version. One or maybe two major enhancements and other bug fixes per release are the goal so expect the version numbers to climb fast.

If you haven't already set up continuous integration for your projects I urge you to immediately. The benefits to this process are countless.

Keep watch for more news!

SiteMapProvider in BugNET

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 03:54:00 GMT

In a forum post not to long ago sabrina_c suggested using the web.sitemap provider as a replacement to the "back" button and "return to menu" buttons that I had implemented in the 0.7 beta.

I had heard about the new web.sitemap features in .NET 2.0 but till now haven't fully explored these features till now. I started out constructing a web.sitemap for BugNET and it works great to create a breadcrumb style navigation. The one problem I ran into was the web.sitemap is static when it comes to querystring properties (unless you hardcode them) which makes it unusable for many of the dynamic pages in the issue tracker. Searching around I found a few links on how to "customize" the rendering of the sitemap at runtime.

The MSDN article that I followed can be found here which simulates a message board forum situation where you might want to render what forum group and post you are on in the breadcrumb, much like BugNET where you are on a particular "issue".

Here is an example of the output that is created after the code modifications followed in the article.

Not apparent in the screenshot but the "issues" link is rendered using the proper query string attributes so that you can return to your last query with just a click of the button.

This added improvement makes navigating through the application much easier and one of the improvements that will be available in the final version of 0.7.

Upgrade Considerations - Updated

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:29:00 GMT

It is getting close to the first release of version 0.7.X of the issue tracker (I promise). The goal is by the end of October to have the first beta release. For those adventurous types, the upgrade scripts are already in the SVN repository but there are still issues to work out before the end of the month. Please refer to the issue tracker for outstanding issues.

In order to prepare your installation for upgrading there are a few things that administrators should know.

Since the user system has changed (once again) over to the .NET 2.0 Membership Provider users will have to have a unique email address. If duplicate email addresses exist the upgrade will not function properly.

The upgrade scripts will set users to unauthorized if the active flag is turned off in the current version, this means you should set users that are no longer in use to inactive so that they will not be able to log in once the upgrade is complete.

Because passwords are now hashed, the upgrade will create random passwords for each user. This means you will not be able to login with existing passwords and users will have to use the forgot password functionality of to generate another password that will be emailed directly to them.

*** This has changed since the initial design. The password format has been changed to encrypt the passwords. This opens up functionality for password recovery and resets. The installer will encrypt any password that meets the password requirements (7 characters by default) and will randomly generate a new password for any user whose password does not meet these requirements. In the works is emailing the user his / her new password. The user can also use the password recovery page (in the works).

Currently there are no plans to upgrade the Environment, Hardware and Operating System fields. If this causes a lot of concern then the final version may contain upgrade logic to migrate these fields to new custom fields.

All in all progress is being made and we are very close to wrapping up a first release. I look forward to moving forward after this release with a more timely release schedule as well.