Integrating Red Gate SmartAssembly in the SQL Server Compact Toolbox

In the next release of the SQL Server Compact Toolbox, which is currently available in an alpha release, I will start using Red Gate SmartAssembly for Error Reporting and quality improvement. In this blog post I will describe the few steps required to integrate SmartAssembly with the Visual Studio VISX build process and in code. Some of these steps are not well documented on the SmartAssembly support site, as in this case we are protecting a DLL file, not an .exe (the more common case), so I thought I would share my findings.

SmartAssembly is a .NET instrumentation tool, that offers centralised error reporting and feature usage tracking (it also offers various obfuscation features, but I am not using these), and includes a nice desktop client, that integrates all the features of the product in a single UI, including viewing your Error Reports and Feature Usage statistics.

MSBuild integration

Once you have downloaded SmartAssembly, you can create a new SmartAssembly project (.saproj file) – do this for your add-in DLL, and save the file. Then look at the useful instructions on this support page. You will need to make a change to the instructions on that page, and possibly also your .saproj file:

In your .csproj file (VISX Add-In project), change the SmartAssembly build task to run AfterCompile, not AfterBuild, like this, and add OverwriteAssembly="True" :

<Target Name="AfterCompile" Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Release' ">   

<SmartAssembly.MSBuild.Tasks.Build OverwriteAssembly="True" ProjectFile="C:\Data\SQLCE\CodePlexTFS\TFS07\SqlCeToolbox\SqlCe35Toolbox\SqlCeToolbox.saproj" />

</Target>

Change the source file in you .saproj file to point to the DLL file in the obj folder, not the bin folder, like so:

<MainAssemblyFileName>.\obj\Release\SqlCeToolbox.dll</MainAssemblyFileName>

This will allow SmartAssembly to instrument your DLL after it has been built, but before it is added to the .VSIX file (which is a .zip file)

 

Invoking Error Reporting in Code

As the Toolbox is an add-in, I prefer not to catch any unhandled Visual Studio exceptions, but would still like to be able to report any errors occurring in the Toolbox, in order to be able to improve it. SmartAssembly easily allows you to to this.

Start by adding references to  SmartAssembly.ReportException.dll and SmartAssembly.ReportUsage.dll in the C:\Program Files\Red Gate\SmartAssembly 6\SDK\bin folder from your project.

Then in order to invoke Error Reporting, use:

SmartAssembly.ReportException.ExceptionReporting.Report(ex);

Then when a handled exception occurs, the user will see this dialog:

And to report usage use:

SmartAssembly.ReportUsage.UsageCounter.ReportUsage(feature);

Where feature is the name of the feature in question.

Hope you found it useful.