QVCS Product Family Newsletter - June 2006

Publication date: June 3, 2006

Contents

• Blog Highlights
• Forum Spam
• QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.10.10 Release Now Available
• Undiscovered Features
• QVCS-Enterprise: 2.0 Beta coming soon

Blog Highlights

I recently wrote two blog entries that fell outside my usual area of comment. The first offered some comments on the scary topic of politics, and the 2nd supplied a rebuttal of sorts to some comments surrounding Sun's recent tentative steps toward Open Source for Java. You can see what I had to say here and here.

Forum Spam

The Russian spamming community has discovered the QVCS forum site. As a result, I've had to lock down comments so that they are moderated.

This will result in some delay in getting your forum comments posted to the forum, but the alternative is simply not acceptable.

So far, I haven't blocked any on-topic posts, and generally perform my moderator duties within 24 hours.

If you think things are taking too long to appear on the forum, or if you think I'm abusing my role as moderator, please let me know by e-mail (making sure to include QVCS in the subject line so I can distinguish your e-mail from Spam).

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.10.10 Release Now Available

The 3.10.10 release is available for download from here or here.

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.

This release is primarily a bug fix build, though it does have one minor new feature. Here's a list of fixes:

• I made some changes to the archive writing code so that it has a better chance of success when writing very large files to network shares. I've tested with files over 200 Megabyte in size, and things work as expected.
• File status is now refreshed automatically in the case where a user attempts to perform an operation that is not allowed. For example, suppose user A checks out a file, and then user B attempts to check out that same file. Ideally, before attempting the checkout, user B types F5 to refresh file status and the checkout attempt would have been prevented -- but in the common circumstance, that will not be the case, and user B's checkout request will fail. Before this fix, user B had to manually type the F5 key after the checkout failed in order to the file list panel would show that user A had checked out the file. After this fix, that refresh is done automatically.
• The status message area is now cleared after a 2 second delay.
• Fixed some other minor usability issues.

The one new feature:

• You can now launch Windows Explorer from the file menu and the popup file menu. The copy of Explorer will open up to the directory containing the selected workfile, and that file will be selected. The menu option is only enabled if the workfile exists.

Undiscovered Features

There was a recent thread on the forum site:

http://qumasoft.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=362#

where a user asked about what turned out to be the directory recursion feature in QVCS-Enterprise... a feature that's also available in QVCS and QVCS-Pro.

I had thought that the recursion feature was obvious (it's a button on the toolbar) -- and yet it clearly was not obvious enough.

I know the guts of these products -- I built them, and use them every day.... and as a result, I'm blind to some usability issues.

As a result of the forum thread noted above, I'll be adding a menu option for directory recursion with the hope that the recursion feature can be discovered more easily.

What other hidden features are in the product? Are there features that you've stumbled upon only after using the product for a long time? What can I do to make your favorite undiscovered feature easier to find?

Please let me know.

QVCS-Enterprise: 2.0 Beta coming soon

The QVCS-Enterprise 2.0 release should be ready for early beta by the end of June. Internally, I have now switched over to using the 2.0 release. Since it supports Microsoft's SCC API, I can now use QVCS-Enterprise from within the Visual Studio IDE.

At this writing, the 2.0 release has 1076 changes to 383 files.... It's not called 2.0 for nothin'.

I plan for this beta cycle to last for a while -- the IDE integration feature needs to get exposed to other IDE's. In addition, the open beta is a great time to solicit user comments on general usability, etc.

I'll announce the beta on the forums and via the blog. Since the beta will be open, all you'll need to do to participate is download the bits.

I'll have a separate forum for beta related comments, like I did for earlier betas.