Cut-down version, I’m not working with SIMS anymore and I can’t pass on my work without them getting a large bill from Capita for using the business objects. Years and years ago I was working on a SIMS help desk at a Local Authority (LA). I had a school log a call asking about importing email addresses. Like many schools this school had just purchased a messaging service that allows sending emails and texts, the problem was they needed them in SIMS ....
Yesterday I went to investigate a problem someone had reported only to discover a butt load of releases As you can see, I have more releases then commits. A build was triggered by a commit, but this doesn’t explain why. I tried switching it up so it only builds when you put [build] in the commit message – which resulted in having to commit the yaml file as the feature isn’t available via the web interface, it does make sense to have this under version control....
So today I managed to move SIMS Bulk Import over to Appveyor. So what does this mean? Well it means I don’t have to worry about going over my Azure credit limit each month for starters! Appveyor has excellent support for GitHub, so each commit is automatically build, tested, and (when I enable it) a new release created. The next release will include Pupil username creation – you can blame\thank Andrew Mulholland for this, I saw his project PiNet and thought we can make this better....
I’m currently getting bogged down with other projects and unfortunately my final sprint of SIMS Bulk Import has grind to a halt. On the plus side I managed to swash a few more bugs last month, get a code signing certificate. This will mean all future releases will be signed as coming from me which is great news, it adds a layer of confidence that the code you run is unaltered by a third party....
Tonight I was trying to get TeamCity to auto-update the version number for my SIMS Bulk Import application, however the simple AssemblyInfo Patcher just failed to work. No errors. Nothing. Then I read the manual, again… Note that this feature will work only for “standard” projects, i.e. created by means of the Visual Studio wizard, so that all the AssemblyInfo files and content have a standard location. So I created a new package which placed the AssemblyInfo....
Last night I chopped up my WIX installer project – I basically split the actual installer parts into one file – CoreMsi.wxs, the versions into a variable file – Version.wxi and the file list into a separate fragment file – SimsBulkImport.wxs. This worked. Great I thought, simple PowerShell script to generate the file list, I can even grab the main repository complied bin as a artifact dependency – got to love TeamCity....
Overview If your in the UK, the chances are your local school is using SIMS .net. Just checkout the stats on their site. 22,000 schools taking 2,500,000 children’s attendance, every day. That’s impressive. So what is SIMS .net? Well its a MIS system, but what is a MIS system? In the simplest terms its a database that holds the school records, for both students and staff. So it makes sense that you are going to want to interface with it as it’s your at your core when it comes to data sources....