Code Review: Visual Studio Hackystat Sensor Project

I have downloaded the setup zip file from the project site, and the installation process was pretty smooth and easy by following their installation guide. Since I am already a Hackystat user, the only external work I need to do is moving the sensorshell.jar file into the correct folder. After that, the sensor is working as intended, and the data is sent correctly by checking via the sensor data browser.

The sensor data types that are available right now are quite a lot. I simply used my visual studio for only 20 seconds (yes, only 20 SECONDS), and there were about 30 different sensor data sent. However, I doubt the usefulness of some of the sensor data types. For example, open and close files. I open and close files quite often without changing anything inside them, and with visual studio debug mode, it's very usual that it will open a file that's not-so-related to your project while you were caught with errors during the debug. For me, I usually close down whatever file that's opened by VS because I know 99% of the time that file isn't the cause of the problem. Therefore, recording data like closing a file doesn't hold any significance to me. Also, the data type of BufferTransition refers to the focus change of a window. From my own experience, switching among different windows is a quite normal and very often task while using an IDE. I am not exactly sure how this data type is is defined, but I am assuming it records whenever the user changes the focus from one window to another window. If that's the case, it would simply generate so many data with no real meaning. What I really want would rather be something like, the window has focus for a certain amount of time and the user is active during this period of time. This way it means the user has probably done something more meaningful in that particular window. Well, it's only my thought.

In terms of bugs, there is an overloaded problem about having more than one instance of VS will cause the sensor to malfunction. Also, the prompt of verifying the sensor has started doesn't show up when I open a solution file, which I assume is the more usual way of how the VS users start working on their project. Technically this isn't a bug, but it would be nice to confirm that the senor is working correctly.

For the testing, I can find two NUnit tests in the source code, but I don't know how to run them, and the developer guide doesn't mention that either. Hopefully they can provide some instruction on that in the future release. Speaking of the source code, the initial distributed version doesn't build successfully due to a null reference to the NUnit stuff. After consulting with Jared, one of the developers, he resolved the problem quickly and re-distributed another working version of the source code. Now only if the real world open source community can be this responsive, the world will be a much nicer place to live.

Overall, the team did a good job on building the sensor. It's functional and easy to install and use. I expect the team will create some sort of GUI interface to configurate the sensor later, and what I would like to see is something about choosing a project for the data that is collected for, just like the eclipse sensor. Because my project is building up something that is somewhat depended on that, I really like that feature to become available in the future.