QVCS Product Family Newsletter - January 2006

Publication date: January 5, 2006

Forum Poll Reminder: Your input needed
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.9.24.1 Release Available
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: Bug Report: Make sure your QVCS temp directory exists
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: In the pipeline: Some more usability improvements
QVCS-Enterprise: 1.2.11 Release Available

Forum Poll Reminder: Your input needed

As noted in last month's newsletter, we're running a poll on the forum site. Thanks to those of you who have participated so far.

I'd like to get still a larger sample of responses. The question is simple:

How many files are in your largest QVCS project?

If you haven't already voted, please, take a minute to register on the forum site, and then cast your ballot so we can get a better notion of the typical QVCS project size.

You can get to the forum site here.

Once registered, here is the link to the poll question is here.

Thanks for your help.

QVCS-Pro and QVCS: 3.9.24.1 Release Available

The 3.9.24.1 release is available for download from the usual location:

http://www.qumasoft.com/QVCSSetup.exe

http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcs.zip.

This is a 'free' update to users who have purchased their license within the past year. Users with older licenses will have to update their license in order to use this release.

Among other things, this release adds support for the $FilePath$ and $HeaderPath$ keywords. The FilePath keyword is similar to the Filename keyword, except that it expands to the project relative path of the file. This makes it so that it will expand to the same string irrespective of the file's actual location. The HeaderPath keyword is identical to the Header keyword, except that it provides a similar project relative expansion of the filename instead of the full path expansion that's provided with the Header keyword.

For more information on other changes in this release, see the QVCS and QVCS-Pro release history web page.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: Bug Report: Make sure your QVCS temp directory exists

A recent support request brought to light a bug that's been present in QVCS and QVCS-Pro for a long time: If the directory defined for QVCS temp files does not exist, then bad things will happen.

The QVCS temp file directory is defined via the Project/Edit Settings... menu option. On the 'Settings' tab of the resulting dialog, there is an edit box where you define the directory that QVCS will use for the temp files that it creates in the course of performing various operations.

The temp file directory setting is shared at the project level -- meaning that the value is stored in qwin.ini. Ideally, the value should point to a directory on a local drive: it's important that the temp files created for user A cannot be seen by user B.

The value I use here is just: C:\temp\

This bug is fixed in the next build. The fixed code makes sure that the temp file directory exists before creating a temp file.

In the meanwhile, if you're seeing crashes on one user's workstation, but no crashes on a different user's workstation, this may be the cause.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: In the pipeline: Some more usability improvements

In addition to fixing the bug noted above, the next QVCS/QVCS-Pro release will include some long awaited usability improvements: The mouse scroll wheel will now (finally) work for the 'Revision Info' pane and the 'File Info' pane. There will also be a new 'Revision Detail' pane that will allow you to copy text from that pane to the clipboard.

In addition, the shading of the file list and revision info pane when a filter is active is now replaced by an indicator on the toolbar.

The current goal is to get these changes completed before the end of January, and to publish this next release soon after that.

You can get an early look at these changes by downloading the latest build candidate:

http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcsCandidate.zip

If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

QVCS-Enterprise: 1.2.11 Release Available

The QVCS-Enterprise 1.2.11 release is available from the usual location:

http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcse.zip

This is a 'free' update to users who have purchased their license within the past year.

This release is a companion release to the QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.9.24 release: It adds support for the same two keywords (FilePath and HeaderPath) added to the QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.9.24 release.

The release also cleans up some of the server exit code so that the rare case of corrupting the authentication and/or role store at server exit is even less likely: it should never happen since the role store and authentication store are no longer updated at server exit.

There are a few other minor changes in this release. Details are available here.