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Webcast: What's New in SCCI for Visual Studio "Whidbey"

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Join us this Friday, April 16 at 9:00-10:30AM PST (GMT-8)  for a live demonstration of several new and improved source code control integration (SCCI) features in Visual Studio “Whidbey”.

Click here to register for the Webcast. Bonus: By attending this webcast you can enter to win a free conference pass to Tech-Ed 2004, which includes a ticket to drink beer with me and Shamu.

The Official Webcast Description

“This webcast focuses on the new features under development for the existing Visual SourceSafe product that will be released along with Visual Studio® .Net codename "Whidbey". The webcast will consist of a series of live demos of these new features, including: SourceSafe Web Service Configuration, Remote Access via HTTP, Performance Improvements, Globalization, Visual Studio Integration: Rename/Deletes, File Dialogs, Asynchronous open.“  

The Inside Scoop

In the past few months, I've delivered breaking news about the feature adds and improvements that you can expect in the next version of Visual SourceSafe (The Future of Visual SourceSafe & The Future of Visual SourceSafe - Part II).

In the Webcast this Friday, you can learn more about our plans in the Visual Studio space for developers who use PVCS, ClearCase, Perforce, SourceGear Vault (Hi, Eric), as well as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, a handful of other commercial source control providers, and perhaps even those that our open source friends (Hi Dan) name after drugstores and nominalized verbs connoting nefarious and anti-social behavior. Microsoft Visual Studio is, proudly, a source control provider-agnostic development environment for .NET developers.

New Source Code Control Integration (SCCI) Features*

  • Rename/Move/Delete Propagation*
    If you use source control in Visual Studio .NET 2002 or 2003 and work on a team, there's a good bet you have not attempted to rename, move, or delete a file in a source-controlled project in a long time, even with careful planning. Do you remember how frustrated you were the first time you tried to check in changes to a project and encountered a cryptic “Pending Add“ dialog for a file that existed in your project when you last checked it out? Does your team's code standard specifically forbid file renames, moves, and deletes? Well, everything is about to change. In the next version of Visual Studio you can perform these operations and trust that the IDE will just do the right thing. For a few rambling thoughts about the difficulty of namespace change propagation for source-controlled files (ahem, my lame excuses), see How To: Rename, Move, and Delete Source-Controlled Items in VS.NET.
  • File Dialogs*
    Do you remember how long it took to figure out that Visual Studio's File|Open from Source Control command is not the only way -- or even the right way after first open -- to open a source-controlled solution or project in the Visual Studio .NET IDE? And every time you did so, a new copy of the solution's files were silently copied to disk? Yeah, we fixed that.
    If your SCC provider supports it, a link to your source control store now appears in the My Places channel in the Open Project and Open Solution dialog boxes. Every time you want to Open or Open from Source Control (there's no longer any difference:), you simply click File|Open Project|My <scc provider> and browse the store for the appropriate project or solution.
  • Asynchronous Open
    Opening large solutions in Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 can be time-consuming. I recently waited for 20 minutes while downloading the latest FlexWiki sources from GotDotNet. The worst part about opening large solutions is that you can't edit anything until the whole solution is available. With the asynchronous open feature, each project in a solution opens independently. As soon as a project is available in its entirety, you can check out one or more of its files and start working, even while Visual Studio and your SCC provider continue to retrieve the latest version of the other projects from source control. Asynch open is like keyless entry for your car: once you have it, you'll never go back. Dmitry Goncharenko, one of the brilliant developers on the VSCore team, conceived this feature over a weekend and had a stable working prototype ready for the Monday team meeting. So much for program managers ;-).

*Note: Your SCC provider may or may not implement this feature.

Visual SourceSafe-specific Feature

  • SourceSafe Web Service Configuration
    At the Webcast, you can learn how to configure Visual Studio “Whidbey“ to access items in your VSS databases over the Internet. If you're an early adopter of Visual Studio, please note that documentation for this feature is not available in the Visual Studio Community Technology Preview (CTP). I should also mention that VSS remote access is only available via Visual Studio. Remote access cannot be enabled in Visual SourceSafe Explorer.

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    Glad to hear, the limitations you listed here are a real PITA today. It baffles me how these weren't supported in VS.NET from the get go. :
  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    Hi Korby.

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    (grrr, I hate the way IE will happy throw away a whole load of text on one of these forms if I click on a sort cut on my desktop)

    Another bug: Clicking on a column header in the pending check in window causes all the files to be ticked.

    Also, you talk about the integration with other source control systems. While Visual Studio does allow this, the integration is based around the way SourceSafe models source control. If would be good if Visual Studio worked a bit better with other source control systems. Even if it just allowed the integration dialog to substitute words in the UI it would be a start (for example "Check in" could become "Submit Changelist" when working with Perforce). Perhaps Microsoft could talk to the other source control companies to see if there is anything they can do to make things work more smoothly.

    Also there are a lot of issues raised in this post on the Perforce mailing list that I would like to see fixed: http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/perforce-user/2004-March/031079.html (you will need to enter a user name and password of 'archive' to read it).

    (sorry this post is a bit negative, I think Microsoft know what is good about their products and I hope that pointing out some of the problems will help them make their software even better)

    Jonathan
  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2004
    Any chance you'll answer my questions in WinDBG entry?
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2004
    Woah, finally it looks like SCCI will behave somewhat better :)
    But, whatabout support for Atomic Check-ins?
  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2004
    Couldn't make it to the webcast. Is this available for download?
  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2004
    Thanks for validating my reason for building SyncVss to solve the rename / move / delete propagation problem for those who can't wait until Whidbey... (sorry for the shameless plug... but a guy's got to make a buck somehow)... seriously tho, I think this is 3 steps sideways and only 1 forward, after 4 years of no movement on VSS, does this portend that it will continue to move forward to be a full SCM player? I look forward to checking out the webcast...
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    I think the SCCI interface must be revamped.

    Its simply not up for the times.

    VSS hasnt moved in 4 years, and MS still wants to preserve backward compat with it?