Paul Roub

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:

1. All awards shows should move that quickly
2. SourceGear products should be nominated whenever possible

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):

Mike: 198,692 - Jeremy: 177,175

Jeremy was also stomped by:

Brian: 90031, Jeremy: 76778

Mark: 162,814 - Jeremy: 162,329

Will: 85,357 - Jeremy: 76285

Kevin: 81055, Jeremy: 62373

(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!

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)