Red Gate forums: SmartAssembly 6

RE: Unable to change Maps location in SA program

Chris.Allen — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:52:25 GMT

Noted. Thanks for the feedback.

RE: Confusion about UsageCounter vs UsageReporter

Chris.Allen — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:05:48 GMT

Sorry for the lack of documentation.

Use:

UsageCounter.ReportUsage

The other one is deprecated.

RE: Control when feature usage data is sent

Chris.Allen — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:03:15 GMT

Truly sorry but no- this is not part of the architecture.

RE: Feature usage reporting with multiple assemblies

DanielRose — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:19:40 GMT

williamw wrote:

In your SmartAssembly projects I assume you only turned on usage reporting for that one assembly, and not for the ones that are calling it to do reporting?

Exactly. I have two different SA project files. One has usage and crash reporting on (which I use for only that "core" assembly) and the other one has only crash reporting on (which I use for everything else).

RE: Can't reference both SmartUsageCore and SmartExceptionCore

williamw — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:24:05 GMT

I worked around this by creating separate assemblies for each of the two templates.

RE: Feature usage reporting with multiple assemblies

williamw — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:07:36 GMT

Chris: The other assemblies are being run through SmartAssembly. Do they also have to have the usage reporting option configured in SmartAssembly? What do you mean by "direct dependency"? They are directly referenced by the main executable assembly.

Daniel: Thanks for the information. That sounds like the way to go. In your SmartAssembly projects I assume you only turned on usage reporting for that one assembly, and not for the ones that are calling it to do reporting?

Unable to change Maps location in SA program

DanielRose — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:51:41 GMT

Last Friday the hard discs on one of our main file servers crashed hard. It is currently in repair. That server also contained the SA map files. The data was restored from backups to a different server.

When trying to change the location of the map files in the SA program, I ran into the following bug: It shows the location (in the options) only as a link. When clicking that link, it tries to connect to the old location (on the old server). However, that server is currently not there, so the connection fails => I am unable to change the location!

I finally managed to change it by updating the value in the database directly.

My suggestion would be to either handle this case in the SA program, or (better) change the program so I have a text box where I can type in the location directly, and a button to open a directory selection box.

RE: Feature usage reporting with multiple assemblies

DanielRose — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:01:55 GMT

I have the same issue in my application.

When applying feature usage reporting to the different assemblies, this results in each assembly being considered a different "version", even if the have the same application name. So even if they belong to the same application, you will see the feature reports being split up. Depending on how you handle asking the user for consent, this can also result in a prompt for each assembly.

The way I solved it was by having a method to report usage in an assembly known by all assemblies, which is wrapper over the actual call to usage reporting. That way, there is only one assembly which gets feature reporting compiled into it, and thus all feature reports for the application appear together.

RE: Feature usage reporting with multiple assemblies

Chris.Allen — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:42:33 GMT

You'll need to apply smartassembly to each assembly that you want this to work on. So that's one extra smartassembly project for each assembly that is not a direct dependency in the 'main' project

Can't reference both SmartUsageCore and SmartExceptionCore

williamw — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:41:39 GMT

The SmartUsageCore assembly includes the SmartExceptionCore namespace so if I reference both I get several errors due to ambiguous names. Is it impossible to have a usage reporting template and an exception reporting template in the same assembly?

Confusion about UsageCounter vs UsageReporter

williamw — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:38:13 GMT

The documentation examples for feature usage reporting use "UsageCounter.ReportUsage" to report feature usage.

The SDK templates define a class that inherits from UsageReporter and define static methods FeatureUsed and DynamicFeatureUsed. There is no documentation on the purpose of these methods, or on the UsageReporter.RecordFeatureUsed methods that they call.

If I am using a custom template, what should my code be calling to report feature usage? UsageCounter.ReportUsage or UsageReporterWithUI.DynamicFeatureUsed?

Control when feature usage data is sent

williamw — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:19:22 GMT

It appears that feature usage data for an application is transmitted when the program terminates. I'm looking at using reporting from a service application that may run for months, and I'd like to get data coming back more frequently than that. Is there any way to change this behavior to report data at intervals while the application is still running?

Feature usage reporting with multiple assemblies

williamw — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:35:26 GMT

I have an application that is built using several assemblies. Both the main executable and the assemblies contain features that I want to do usage reporting on. The assemblies are not being merged into the application but they are getting run through SmartAssembly for protection.

What do I need to do to get feature reporting for all the assemblies? Do I have to turn on the option in SmartAssembly for each assembly? Or is turning it on in the main (executable) assembly enough if I have put the attributes in the other assemblies?

If I need to configure it separately for each assembly, does the user get prompted separately when each assembly tries to report usage? If I use the same application name for all of them will that be enough?

RE: Error Reporter localization

dybalabj — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:11:20 GMT

It looks like it's working after all. We had changed out solution so that all projects output to the same folder, and had forgotten to updated our SmartAssembly post-build event to get the custom error handler from its new location. Since we hadn't deleted the old builds, it was using a build that wasn't localized.

RE: Licensing model for Team Foundation Service

kozw — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:36:31 GMT

SmartAssembly needs to be installed and a license check is performed whether the license is not activated on another machine.

There are N build machines in the TFS cloud and installing software is not allowed. The current license check simply won't work with TFS service. Is this something you are willing to look into?