SourceGear Vault Broke the Back of My Crappy Week
2/7/2008 5:19:28 PM
Last week has sucked. Big time. Started off with the flu on Monday. That's always great. Working from home usually means not getting sick but I went out for a night on the town with a group of friends last Friday night and probably crossed paths with some people who are less germaphobic than me.
With this project I had to use SourceGear vault (won't even link to it). After spending about an hour to get it to work with VS 2005 and SQL 2005 (fwiw, using VS 2003 Compatibility Client) VS 2005 now likes to freeze, ( NOT RESPONDING ), and close. I also have this new add-on where I open a project, start typing a bunch of changes, click 'SAVE', then get a (NOT RESPONDING) for about a minute. After my environment comes to I try to right-click and all my pop-up menu items are disabled. AWESOME! I then have to close the file I'm working on WITHOUT saving changes (because I am now in disconnected mode and can't checkout files), open the file again and re-write my original changes that I couldn't save 5 minutes ago.
I am an obsessive File -> Save-All guy. I probably do this at least once every 2-5 minutes. I write a lot of code and with fast-code writing and handy refactoring you can put a huge dent in a class library, .js, .aspx, or code-behind in a short amount of time. My newest add-in (can't really say it's related in any way to SGV, is that Visual Studio 2005 will just crash with an error "The compiler has stopped working." That's pretty cool. I've never seen that before and will try to get a screen shot next time. It has only happened twice so it's pretty elusive.
Periodically I can't cancel builds. This annoys me beyond textual descriptions so I'll leave it at that. This is a pretty important feature to have or to not have fail; depending on how you look at it.
I am a huge fan of Subversion when it comes to source control. Every company I work for uses it. It's simple. When I want to work on a project I connect to a company-specific VPN, right-click my solution, click UPDATE (if existing), or CheckOut (if new) and disconnect from the VPN once it's either updated or downloaded. For my machines I use TortoiseSVN which is a Subversion client. Both are completely free and open-source. TortoiseSVN commands are accessible via Windows Explorer so it's very unintrusive. Once you are done making your code changes you simply connect back to the VPN (if needed) and right-click your solution -> 'Commit'. Done. If someone else checks in the same stuff you were working on (same file) then, like most versioning software, you can either merge, use all of mine / theirs; all with the help of a nice diff tool.
Anyone want to help me with SourceGear? I've heard great things. It just so happens it hasn't been so great with me. :-(
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