We've donated several license bundles as giveaways at the School of Dev event this weekend, in Tulsa, OK.
Up for grabs for attendess: 2 five-user Fortress licenses, 2 five-user Vault licenses.
As always, if you're looking for giveaways, swag, $$$, etc. for your user group or code camp -- drop me a line at paul.roub@sourcegear.com
I've been toying with the idea of integrating Fortress and Vault into Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is, at heart, a scripting wrapper for .NET libraries. Combining that with the Vault Client API (or the equivalent Fortress Client API) seems like a no-brainer.
There are a lot of ways to go here:
For today, not having done and PowerShell scripting before, I'm opting for the last one.
In particular, when I'm in PowerShell, it would be nice to know with Vault/Fortress folder is mapped to my current directory. This is particularly helpful when I have multiple branches of a project in play, and want to see which branch I'm playing with right now.
In action, it looks like this:
The fun part is that this took just a few lines of PowerShell code. The API does all the heavy lifting.
What's the catch? This is not the most-comprehensive approach I could have taken -- it's more a proof of concept. We're piggybacking on the Vault/Fortress Command-Line Client's saved login info, so you must have run vault.exe with the REMEMBERLOGIN option at some point. We're also tied to the previously-selected repository.
Correcting those limitations, or implementing the other possibilities mentioned above, is left as an exercise to the reader (or maybe the writer, given a decent chunk of free time)...
The code itself:
## Display SourceGear Fortress/Vault folder mapped to the current directory
## Paul Roub <paul.roub@sourcegear.com>
##
# did we successfully log in?
$sgLoggedIn = $false
# at start up -- attempt to load the Vault lib and log in
#
# Vault users -- change "Fortress Client" below to "Vault Client"
#
[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom($ENV:ProgramFiles +
'\SourceGear\Fortress Client\VaultClientIntegrationLib.dll')
$sgLoaded = $true
# Log in based on previously-saved (via vault.exe) credentials. Will attach to
# the previously-selected repository
#
[VaultClientIntegrationLib.ServerOperations]::Login("Client", $true, $true)
$sgLoggedIn = $true
# Replace the default command prompt. This should be loaded via
# your profile.ps1 to work properly.
#
function prompt
{
# set the window title to our current dir
$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = $(get-location)
# I like a blank line after the last command. If you don't,
# comment this out.
Write-Host ""
# If we didn't log in, don't bother attempting other Fortress operations
if ($sgLoggedIn)
{
# If there is no mapped folder here, an exception will be thrown.
# Catch it, note the lack of a mapping, and continue.
trap [Exception]
{
$sgFolder = $false
continue;
}
# Grab the mapped folder as an object
$sgFolder =
[VaultClientIntegrationLib.RepositoryUtil]::FindVaultFolderAtReposOrLocalPath($pwd)
if ($sgFolder)
{
# Get the full repository path, and display it in gray above
# the regular prompt
$sgPath = $sgFolder.FullPath
$pval = "(" + $sgPath + ")"
Write-Host ($pval) --foregroundcolor Gray
}
}
# Whatever we return will be displayed as the remainder of the prompt
"PS> "
}
SD West was exhausting, and a lot of fun. Both of which are to be expected from a good show.
Personally, it was great to talk to so many customers (and potential customers). I have pages of scribbled notes and ideas, pulled straight from those talks. Thanks!
The Jolt Awards, as hosted by (Dread Pirate) Robert X. Cringely, were a model for all awards presentations to come. By which I mean:
We're proud to say that DiffMerge won a Jolt Productivity Award in the "Change/Config Management" category.
But what you really want to know is, how well did Jeremy fare in his first semi-professional Guitar Hero outing?
Not badly at all. 30-plus wins, 5 losses. Or, I should say, losses to 5 opponents. One kept coming back to stomp Jeremy some more (although Jeremy did win one of the rematches).
That would be Mike. First win (the one we counted):
Jeremy was also stomped by:
(his wife is, arguably, very proud)
And finally, the Evil Mastermind guitar was raffled off Thursday evening. In a perfect world, we wanted it to end up in the hands of someone who would play it — not flip it on eBay in a few days. In an even more-perfect world, someone with a son learning to play guitar himself. Hey, how about a whole family of guitar players?
And that's how it turned out.
Congratulations to Mark and his family!
The booth's set up, the literature's out, and we're performing rigorous QA on Guitar Hero.
T-Shirts? Yes, we have a few. New ones, in fact.
And of course we're all set for the giveaway...
Our friendly neighborhood print ad salesperson insisted on this one. I think I did a decent job of appearing sort-of-comfortable having my picture taken.
The plan is to update that Flickr set with Guitar Hero winners, etc. throughout the week. And blog said photos, as well. Stay tuned.
I caused some trouble recently... mostly for myself, as it turns out.
We were discussing plans for the trade shows SourceGear is attending this year, and had more-or-less settled on a 'beat Jeremy at Guitar Hero contest' as the main attention-getting activity. But we also wanted a giveaway, a raffle open to all attendees.
In the past, that's taken the form of Wiis, Xboxes, etc. Always fun, but everyone's doing it.
And then I noticed that a certain guitar manufacturer now has a custom shop wherein you can upload your own artwork, which will then end up as custom graphics on your specially-built guitar. The thought of giving away an Evil Mastermind guitar was just too appealing. Given that Eric and I have shared interests in this area, we quickly agreed that we had to do this.
John Woolley, graphic genius and mastermind of the Evil Mastermind, even did a all-new "painted" rendition of T.E.M. for the occasion.
Sadly, Big Guitar Company has something like a 20-week lead time, and it took almost 3 weeks for them to return phone calls asking if that could be improved on — by which time, it was really too late to be ready for SD West.
But we found another company, Art Guitar, who do essentially the same job, but on existing guitars. And in much less than 20 weeks.
So what guitar, now that we weren't bound to a single manufacturer? I chose a Schecter PT Custom because (a) it's a plain, black top, making a nice canvas and (b) well,
That's why. Turns out they're a bit hard to find at the moment. Scored one from eBay, one from a music store, still waiting for more.
After scrambling to find the first couple of PTs we'd need, it was disassembly time (easier for Art Guitar if we just send bodies).
So what arrived as this:
was stripped by Shaw and myself to this (as modeled by Shaw):
Off to Art Guitar for a few weeks, and this morning the finished product arrived:
Actually, two (one's for TechEd):
So once again, I got to spend the morning with soldering iron and screwdrivers in hand, and we end up with this:
It's all set to be picked up by FedEx this afternoon, off to the show, just in time:
Want to win it, case and all? Stop by SourceGear's booth (#308) at SD West next week and we'll tell you when to pick up your raffle ticket.
And don't forget to beat Jeremy and score some free Fortress licenses -- he's good, but he's not that good.
SourceGear Vault 4.1 and Fortress 1.1 were released today. These maintenance releases are both free upgrades for users of Vault 4.0 and Fortress 1.0, respectively. We highly recommend that you upgrade, as these releases contain many performance and stability improvements, plus some very cool new features.
SourceGear would like to thank our user community for all of the testing, suggestions and feedback during our Beta period.
So what's new? Visual Studio 2008 integration, Work Item tracking in the standalone client, more integration, easier image handling, and more.
(See the release notes for full details)
(See the release notes for full details)
The new betas are out! Fortress 1.1b2 and Vault 4.1b2 dropped today -- see the release notes here, download Fortress 1.1b2, or download Vault 4.1b2.
A few weeks ago, we submitted SourceGear DiffMerge 3.1 for Jolt Award consideration -- because, for lack of a better turn of phrase, we think it's really cool. If you're not familiar, DiffMerge is a best-of-breed compare/merge tool for files and folders, running under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. And it's free.
And this week we find that DiffMerge is a finalist in the Change/Config Management category. So congrats to Jeff Hostetler (the man behind DiffMerge) -- and we'll see what happens next.
We're sponsoring the December 19th meeting of the Tucson .NET User Group -- the usual deal: T-shirts, Fortress license giveaways, comics, and of course food and beverage money.
As always, if you're looking for a sponsor for your next .NET, Java, or Eclipse user group meeting, drop me a line at paul.roub@sourcegear.com.
