QVCS-Pro and QVCS 3.10.6 Now Available

I just the 3.10.6 release.

As I've noted before, the main point of this release is to add support for .dll based triggers. Testing has confirmed that performance is pretty good... generally much better performance than you get using .exe based triggers.

There are a few other goodies in there. The one I like the most is the change to the way checkout comments are handled. In previous releases, you could enter a comment at checkout time, and that comment would become the default comment at checkin time. The problem with the old implementation is that no one could see what your checkout comment was. It was a secret. The new implementation makes your checkout comment visible to everyone. This makes it much easier to include some note in your checkout comment that others will find useful -- like explaining why you have checked out a given revision.

The other big 'under-the-hood' change in this release is a change to the way cache locking works. The new locking scheme is compatible with the 3.9 cache locking scheme, but adds the ability to determine whether a cache lock is a read-only lock or not. The great thing about read-only cache locks is that there can be multiple lockers -- which means there can be many concurrent 'readers' of the cache. This should greatly reduce the number of cache collisions for larger teams. This doesn't make cache collisions go away -- it just makes them less likely.

You can get the bits from the usual locations: here or here. 

Final 3.10 Candidate available

I just uploaded the latest (final) candidate build for the upcoming 3.10 release. You can get it here .

The docs are pretty much complete, and it is code complete as well. If anything changes between now and February 28, it will just be to fix any last minute bugs.

The big change in this build is support for read-only access to the cache file. This makes cache collisions much less likely, since most access to the cache is read-only access. This build also has some performance tweeks that make it faster than earlier builds.

QVCS and QVCS-Pro 3.10 in progress

When I'm busy coding, I spend less time updating the blog.... that combined with shaking off a cold made entries here that much less frequent.

In any case, the release for the end of February is taking shape. It's got two major 'features':

1. Support for .dll based triggers
2. Improved support for checkout comments.

The .dll based trigger support allows the QVCS-Pro user to code up their trigger code in a .dll instead of having the trigger code run in a separate executable. This makes the trigger faster, since the call to the trigger code is just a function call instead of launching a separate executable. In addition, the parameters passed to the .dll based trigger are a little more complete than the parameters passed to a trigger executable. I've got a sample trigger .dll project included in the distribution, along with the built version of that trigger .dll so you can try it out. I also moved the sample trigger executable code and project into a .zip file included in the distribution so it's easier to build your own, using the boilerplate code I provide.

The improved support for checkout comments makes it so checkout comments are visible to other users via an entry in the Revision Info panel (and the Revision Detail panel). This should make checkout comments more useful.

I checked with my marketing department (looking in the mirror), and we decided that this end-of-February release should begin the 3.10 series of releases. The decision is a bit arbitrary, but a lot of marketing is that way.

In any case, you can preview the bits by downloading the latest candidate build.

Web site migration

qumasoft.com now has a new home. I'm still hosted on Verio, but I switched hosting plans so that outbound mail from qumasoft.com will have a much lower chance of being treated as SPAM.

Hopefully, this migration has been pretty transparent, but if there seem to be any hiccups, please let me know. (e-mail is now working as expected).