Paul Roub

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.

What's new in Fortress 1.1

(See the release notes for full details)

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are an exciting new feature in Fortress that allows you to add a few keywords to work items, and then see a graphical depiction of the distribution of those keywords. Similarly, you can view a graphical depiction of the distribution of work items among assignees, milestones, and other work item fields.

New Query Page and support for Saved Queries

The web client has a new Query page and allows you to create, run, edit and delete saved queries.

GUI based work item tracking

The Stand-alone Windows client now has a GUI based bug tracking client.

Easy image attachments

The Windows GUI client, Visual Studio Enhanced Client and the Eclipse client all support pasting image attachments from the clipboard. In addition, a limited image editor is included in order to crop or annotate the image. Also, attachments may be added using drag-and-drop functionality.

What's new in Vault 4.1 (and also in Fortress)

(See the release notes for full details)

Visual Studio 2008 support

This is the first version of Vault that offers integration with Visual Studio 2008.

Legacy IDE options

Users requested a few options available in the Classic Client be implemented in the VS Enhanced Client. The two options that have been implemented are Get Latest when a solution is opened and Check In when a solution is closed.

VS Enhanced Context Menus

The VS Enhanced Client's context menus were rearranged in order to provide easier access to commonly used operations.

Better progress indicators In the VS Enhanced client

The Add Solution and Check In commands now give status as to what is occurring.

Refresh Source Control Status

In the VS Enhanced client, there's a new menu item in the File->Vault submenu to refresh all source control statuses to update file icons in the Solution Explorer.

64 bit support

We've corrected the installer issue that was preventing server installs on a 64 bit OS. IIS will still need to be put into 32 bit mode.

Ant Tasks

Tasks are included for calling Vault source control operations from the Ant build tool.

Java CLC

For users on non-Windows platforms, there is now a Java based command line client.

New Web Diff Page

The Web Diff page has been rewritten to make it more useful for code reviews.

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.