QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.12 build available; Partial roadmap for 2.1

As promised yesterday, I posted the QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.12 build this morning.

It cleans up a few problems from the earlier 2.0.x builds -- more details are available here. 

Now... on to QVCS-Enterprise 2.1. The product roadmap for 2.1 includes support for file renaming, and possibly support for file moves, directory renames, and directory moves. These latter features are especially tricky... so I'm not sure if they'll 'fit' into 2.1 or if they'll arrive in a later release. They are all important features to have as more and more developers use tools that make code refactoring easy to do.

Using Parallel's VM's for other platform support

Over the past week, I've been getting the Enterprise 2.0.12 build ready -- it will be released tomorrow. Along the way, I thought it would be nice to verify that it works on the lastest Fedora Linux, and also to see if I could get it to work on Sun Solaris 10.

The short answer is that QVCS-Enterprise (2.0.12) now works on both these platforms... as well as Windows XP, and W2K.

To add support for these additional environments, I've been using an evaluation copy of Parallels Workstation . It provides support for a number of different 'guest' operating systems, including numerous flavors of Linux, as well as Solaris 10. I made a few minor cleanup changes in the Enterprise Java code, and voila, things are working well on both platforms.

The most difficult thing I ran into was the Solaris install. I had to try it several times, tweeking things this way and that, until it finally took. Parallels provides some support forums  that helped to figure out some things to try. The Fedora install, in contrast, was pretty simple, though in fairness, I've done many Linux installs in the past.

Both operating systems are simple enough to use, once you get them installed. Solaris comes preinstalled with Java 5, so I didn't have to do anything there to get Java support. For Fedora, I still had to download and install the Sun JVM.... though I suppose that will soon change, since Sun has now open-sourced Java under the GPL.

Performance within the Parallels VM is pretty good -- though I will probably spring from some more memory so that things don't swap as much as they do now (I have only 1 Gig on the workstation I'm using for testing).

It's too bad that Apple doesn't provide a version of their OS. I've seen rumors that users have succeeded in getting it to run in a VM... but that's not sanctioned by Apple. The new iMac's look pretty cool... so maybe I'll just get me one for Christmas... then I'll be able to include the Mac as an officially supported platform for QVCS-Enterprise.

Visual Studio 2005 and ~sak temp files

Visual Studio 2003 and VS 2005 sometimes use ~sak.... named temp files to probe the capabilities of a version control provider. The relavant Microsoft MSDN article is here.

Neither QVCS-Pro nor QVCS-Enterprise support the use of a MSSCCPRJ.SCC file described in the article, so in order to get Visual Studio to forego the use of these ~sak... temp files, it's necessary to add a registry setting that tells Visual Studio to skip the creation of these feature probing temp files.

QVCS-Pro 3.10.14 does this already for VS 2003, but it does not do it for VS 2005. The QVCS-Enterprise client installer does not set the registry key at all.

If you want to disable the creation of these ~sak files, for VS 2005, you can manually set the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\SourceControl] "DoNotCreateTemporaryFilesInSourceControl"=dword:00000001

For VS 2003, the corresponding registry key is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\SourceControl] "DoNotCreateTemporaryFilesInSourceControl"=dword:00000001

Visual Compare for .doc files and spreadsheets

QVCS can version control anything that's stored in a file -- including binary files. Performing a visual compare on binary files, however, is usually worthless unless you use a visual compare tool that is 'aware' of the file format for the given binary file type. For some of the popular binary file formats, these kinds of visual compare tools exist. For example, you can use a tool from Zizasoft to perform visual compares of Microsoft Word documents. Alternately, you could use a tool from Formula Software to compare different revisions of an Excel spreadsheet (See our resources page for some other alternatives).

Suppose you want to be able to use these tools, and still use a vanilla visual compare utility for the rest of your files? Can that be done? Yes... but you have to use a batch file so that different file extensions will launch different file compare utilities. For QVCS and QVCS-Pro, you need to create a batch file that looks something like this:


IF %~x1==.DOC goto docFiles
IF %~x1==.doc goto docFiles

IF %~x1==.XLS goto xlsFiles
IF %~x1==.xls goto xlsFiles

:otherFiles
"C:\qvcsbin\ExamDiff.exe" "%1" "%2"
goto end

:docFiles
cd "C:\Program Files\Zizasoft\zsComparePro"
zsComparePro.exe '/leftFile:%1' '/rightFile:%2' /fileOptions:"By Character" /noSplash
goto end

:xlsFiles
cd "C:\Program Files\Excel Compare"
xlsc.exe "%1" "%2" /allSheets
goto end

:end


In QWin3, you would then select the Admin/Preferences... menu, and on the Utilities tab, enter the path to the batch file so that it looks something like:


C:\qvcsbinTest\myCompare.bat "%s" "%s"


For QVCS-Enterprise, you can do something similar. You can use the same batch file described above. To get the QVCS-Enterprise client to use this instead of the built-in visual file compare, you need to start the client, select the Admin/User Preferences... menu option, and on the Utilities tab, enable the 'Use External Visual Compare Tool'. In the associated edit box, you need to enter a command line that looks like:


C:\qvcsbin\myCompare.bat file1Name file2Name