this file is made last year before I changed job.

Favorite Projects.docx (17.61 KB)
 

My Vault Demo slids for in our company IT managers

Vault1.ppt (64 KB)

VSS Does not offer cheap branching, so we hesitate to create branches. Also does not support ActionScript type filenames which forced us to use Subversion for FLEX development. Now we straddle using two Version Control systems.
Vault combines the best of VSS and Subversion and adds some enhancements of its own.
Surveyed about 20 Version Control systems. Several are cheaper(free), Several are more powerful (AccuRev, Team Concert). Vault has by far the lowest learning curve, has the essential features and is priced competitively.





 

I want to help our company to improve the application development life cycle. we likely will to chose Vault\Fortress as our Revision Control tool.
Below is my design of Application Development\QA\Build flow.
I will discuss with my boss base on this diagram.

 

After installed and tested Vault/Fortress. I think Vault has many features very useful for our team:

1. Vault can import the data from database of VSS, and you can compare the update histories between VSS and Vault  
2. Cheap branching, very fast and height efficiency. Atomic check in support. All the files you check in same time regard as one unit, if one of them commit failed then all the files will be rollback.
3. You can shelve you unfinished change, and you can un-shelve it any where.
4. Client User GUI is supper friendly and straightforward. Much easier to use than VSS or any other revision tools.

It has Integrated GUI with VS and Eclipse. In Visual Studio, only need 3 steps you can switch the opened solution from control of VSS to Vault.

 

5. Supper easy to merge, it has similar functions like Beyond Compare, but integrated in its GUI. The tools of compare  branches and folders is also very useful when we do branch merge.
6. It use SqlServer database as its backend, so it is easy to management.

It has Programming API, we can do some integration work ourselves if need.

7         Fortress is a Project Management and Bug tracking system. It integrated with VauLt, when you check in, you can easily broswer the project/bug items you are working on, and associate the “Bug_Id” with the checkin. All description in project/Bug item can be load to check in comments with out “Copy\paste”. You can force all check in must need a bug_Id.

8         Higher Security, you can set different privilege for projects/branches with different developers and groups.

 

There are more features I didn’t list.

More information available at http://www.sourcegear.com/products.html

 

I like to try some Version Control Site. After some search. I found http://www.xp-dev.com/ and https://www.projectlocker.com/ looks good.
another choice,free svn/git : http://www.assembla.com/catalog/tag/free
I will test the speed and tools of the service and give report later.


In My previous job, I was using vss and svn same time for my project,,,I check in to Vss every day as my privite branch and update/check in to svn trunk for release (QA/Tesing) when a test completed.

 

And these are two SVN plugins for visual studio:

 

 1)Free svn visual studio extension (open source): http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/downloads

 2) Visual svn ($49): http://www.visualsvn.com/

There are both good, but usually I think the tortoise svn is good enough.

 

3) Svn vs. Git

And there is comparison between couple popular version control tools:

http://versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/Git/Mercurial/Subversion/Visual%20SourceSafe/index.html

 

As I know more and more projects teams moved from svn to git recently.

Git’s strong point is branch and merge.( http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/why-you-should-switch-from-subversion-to-git/ http://www.brandonsavage.net/git-versus-subversion-a-reconsideration/ )

I have no chance to use git yet, but almost all the people I know who used git recommend Git.  Since we only have one project in svn, maybe use Git  is good for us in the long term thought.

 

Just my two cents:

The svn,vss or Git are just tools,  the important thing is everybody follow the right procedure /rules. 

 

Thanks

 

project management cartoon