Paul Roub

In talking with SourceGear customers, and with current or recovering SourceSafe users, and -- to be honest -- in my own past history, a painful task occurs all-too-frequently. I'm talking about the manual "push to production" of a particular fix, feature, or set of files for a web site. Just that set of files, no more, no less. And sometimes it's tricky.

We had a customer ask recently how Vault might help them:

1. Find just the files associated with a particular update...
2. Warn if any of the files involved included changes for later, as-yet-unapproved updates...
3. Fail in that case, otherwise...
4. Copy those files to production

or in a more-perfect world,

1. Move the affected files as they existed at the time the fix was checked in
2. Unless later overlapping fixes have been pushed, in which case the latest approved-to-be-pushed version should be used

Having fun yet? They're not.

It's a common setup -- imported as-is from SourceSafe; a single folder hierarchy for development; production is not under version control; and dev is at least several features ahead of production.

While we did discuss means by which they could use Vault's Client API to script this sort of thing, I'd like to demonstrate how they might get off that treadmill, save themselves a ton of manual labor, and bring production under control.

Spending most of next week at the DevConnections / VS & .NET Connections show in Las Vegas. If you're attending the conference, please drop by booth #333 and say "hi".

Get a T-shirt (while they last); claim a special show discount on SourceGear software; and talk my ear off about what you'd like to see in upcoming Vault and Fortress versions.

If you're still using Visual SourceSafe ⁽¹⁾, but you'd like to upgrade the tools used for visual diffing and merging, here's how to plug in DiffMerge:

In VSS 2005's Tools | Options dialog, you'll want to first Add an entry for Operation File Difference. For the File Extension, enter .*

For the command line, you'll need to find the full location of DiffMerge.exe. By default, it's in c:\program files\sourcegear\diffmerge; if your system is different, substitute accordingly. Assuming the default path, your command line would be (all one line):

C:\Program Files\SourceGear\DiffMerge\diffmerge.exe --title1="original version" --title2="modified version" %1 %2

Similarly, to set DiffMerge as your Visual Merge too, add a File Merge entry, whose command line is:

C:\Program Files\SourceGear\DiffMerge\diffmerge.exe --title1="source branch" --title2="base version" --title3="destination branch" --result=%4 %1 %3 %2

When all's said and done, your options dialog will look something like:

And Visual Merging will lead you to:

1. Why? Please stop that. If not Vault, then something else)

SourceGear is a sponsor of the November 20, 2007 meeting of the Chicago Java Users Group.

We're helping fund the food, as well as kicking in some T-shirts, comics, and a 10-user Fortress license. We could do the same for your .NET or Java/Eclipse user group.

Drop me a line if you're interested.

It's beta day -- specifically, the Vault 4.1 and Fortress 1.1 betas.

Tag clouds, Visual Studio 2008 support, image paste/edit, Ant tasks, a pure-Java command-line-client, and more. We've set up a beta server for you to play with, and all the bits are available to install and test locally as well.

An interesting detail -- the image paste/edit features are currently only available in Eclipse (they'll be in VS.NET in a later beta). I'm pretty sure this is the first time a new feature has shown up in Eclipse before VS.

See the beta announcement for details.

I've fallen in love with a new tool known as ack. It's basically grep, the way I want grep to work when coding:

• Full Perl regular expressions
• Iterates over directories by default
• Skips source control directories (q.v.)
• Easily restricted to certain file types

So if I'm searching a tree of Perl files, instead of something like:

grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | \
  grep -v _sgbak)

(to find Perl program, module, and POD files, skipping anything in Vault/Fortress _sgbak folders), I can just say:

ack --perl pattern

And yes, as of version 1.74, ack includes Vault and Fortress in its list of supported version control tools. So if I want to see references to the explodeMinion46 function, I can just say:

ack explodeMinion46

To recursively search my current directory, avoiding backup files along the way.

There are a number of other options, including configuring your own exclusions, etc. on the fly -- but for me, the out-of-the-box behavior is now exactly what I want.