Paul Roub

Upside: we had a great time at PDC, got to talk to tons of users and potential users, and went through all of our T-Shirts and CDs very quickly.

Downside: if you dropped by the booth after Tuesday, you might be without a CD.

We've collected all of our PDC booth materials (not including the shirt, of course) in one place, at sourcegear.com/pdc. And yes, that includes the VSS Must Die desktop wallpaper.

I'll be part of the booth team at Microsoft PDC '09 next week in Los Angeles — we'll be showing off Vault 5, Fortress 2, SoS 5… and maybe giving away some new T-shirts.

So by all means, drop by booth 511, say "hi", and tell Eric that Product Managers need SSDs, too.

Hot on the heels of SourceOffSite 5.0's release, SoS 5.0.1 is out with some important bug fixes. The SoS dev and QA team put a lot of effort into getting a solid, well-tested release out in a very short time span. Nice work.

Key changes in this release:

Client

• Get latest on a folder now correctly retrieves missing files in the immediate folder.
• Project History maintains History options for "Include Files", "Include Labels", and "Labels Only" between client sessions.
• View/Edit tool has been corrected to save the settings in the User options.
• The IDE can be configured to not emit a disconnect message which may crash IDEs such as VB 6.
• The Auto connect option used from within the IDE client now connects upon opening a project.

Server

• The server corrected a problem where project history incorporating a FROM or TO label to sets the boundaries for the History results.

If you're a SourceOffSite user and haven't yet seen SoS 5… you really, really should. Looks, features, performance — this is a huge upgrade.

Something I should not probably not admit publicly (both from a best-practices standpoint, and given that we are a vendor of version control tools):

Until recently, our website was not version-controlled.

There, I've said it.

sourcegear.com is largely maintained by myself and John Woolley, our Director of Graphic Awesomeness.* John's is a Mac-centric universe, and I'm running Windows. For web-maintenance purposes, we both use Dreamweaver.

As you may know, Fortress and Vault both offer Dreamweaver integration; but there are a couple of issues:

1. With each new version of Dreamweaver, the location and requirements for our integration code seems to change. This is not much fun from a support and maintenance point of view.
2. This integration method is Windows-only — which, as you can imagine, makes it less than useful for John.

So John was out in the cold. He's not alone in wanting Dreamweaver/Mac support — it's been a long-time feature request from a number of our customers. But as always, the development team needs to work on the features most requested by the most customers. What we needed was someone with some time on his hands, who really wanted this particular itch scratched...

So last Thanksgiving, unable to move after dinner, I started playing around with a hobby project.*

Dreamweaver, out of the box, supports checkin/checkout/locking via WebDAV. If we had a WebDAV layer over Vault/Fortress, Dreamweaver could use it without any special code installed. Other tools could use it to, and we wouldn't have to worry about specific Dreamweaver versions, operating systems, etc.

So, with excellent test clients and validation tools in hand, off I went.

Within a day or so, this was happening:

Allowing this:

And, with no extra effort, this:

Open standards kinda rock, if you needed any more evidence.

It's been in use every day since.

Starting as soon as next week, you can try out the WebDAV interface yourself, in Vault 5 Beta 1. Watch the Development Blog for details. We'd love to hear feedback and suggestions from the brave, the few, daring enough to use The Code that the Marketing Guy Wrote.*

1. John always tells me to use "whatever title [I] want" when referring to him. He should know better by now.
2. If your hobby project is useful to more people than yourself, think twice before mentioning it to the development lead.
3. Don't worry, the code has long since been vetted, reviewed and revised by the actual development team.

Or so it would appear.

We’re co-sponsoring 4 upcoming code camps at the moment - contributing money, swag, and Fortress giveaways. And we’d be happy to help out with yours (or your user group meeting) as well — just let me know

Here’s the list as it stands at the moment:

Southwest Florida Code Camp: Saturday, September 13, Estero, FL

Central Coast Code Camp: Saturday and Sunday, September 27th and 28th, San Luis Obispo, CA

Argentina Code Camp: Saturday, October 4, Universidad Abierta Interamericana

Jacksonville Code Camp: Saturday, October 23, Jacksonville, FL

When we’re not busy putting together real guitars, or playing plastic ones, we’re hard at work on upcoming Vault and Fortress releases.

We’ve got some major new capabilities in various stages of design and development… and Jeremy would like to offer you a peek at what we’re doing in the way of shelving.

One of my recent pet projects is to add a number of videos to the Fortress section of sourcegear.com. Currently, “a number” translates to “three”.

Basically, we’d noticed that while Version Control concepts and features can often be nicely explained in screenshots and text, it’s harder to do on the bug tracking / ALM side of things. Especially when we’re dealing with combined Bug Tracking and Version Control features, and their interaction with IDEs, etc.

But these things are easy, and fun, to show — as we do at trade shows, in person, in our online demos, etc. So the plan is to get as much of that info up on the site as possible.

Why is line history so cool? Let me show you.

How do Fortress “clouds” help you find your way through a forest of Work Items? Let me show you.

And the latest — we’re always encouraging people to take a look at Fortress for themselves. The download’s not huge, the requirements are slight, and installation is quick. But everyone says that, and the installation’s never quick.

So really, how quick? “Minutes”? Really? Take a look.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jeremy has launched the SourceGear Development Blog -- where we'll give you a peek at upcoming features (including some that are still on the drawing board), as well as beta schedules and progress reports.

For now, the focus will be on the Fortress 1.1 / Vault 4.1 development cycle. Stay tuned.