Search results matching tag 'source control'

Version Control by Example: Review and how to get it for free.

Mischa Kroon — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:32:00 GMT

I just read: Version Control by Example

It's a free printed book which can be shipped to your home for free by filling out a page full of questions.
If you want the details on how to get it shipped to your home or have any questions about it find out the details here.

Quick review of the book:

Introduction

The book gives you a quick intro about version control systems, it tells you about the history of version control systems and how they got here.

What the different commands are for the version control systems and how they work in the specific version control systems examined in the book.

It then goes into how you can use the different version control systems through the command line interface, so that you can see the differences on how to handle increasingly complex situations.
The version control systems it gives the examples for are:

- Subversion
- Mercurial
- Git
- Veracity (SourceGears product)

There is also a bit about the differences between DVCS and CVCS, distributed version control systems and centralized version control systems.

My Opinions

I really like the way the book looks, it's pretty so it leaves a good first impression.

In talking about the differences between DVCS and CVCS I think it goes a long way to take away a bit of the fear surrounding DVCS.

By focusing on the command line clients of the different VCS systems you're looking at the basics which are great because it gives you the feeling of actually knowing what you're doing.
The reality for a developer like me working with VCS is someone not working with command line clients but mostly using IDE / Explorer integration to get the job done.
So the quality of integration and the tooling available around the VCS'es becomes very important to the way I use VCS, still not talking about this makes perfect sense to me because the tooling landscape is very adaptive and will change over time and the VCS which is on top now can easily be on the bottom when the next generation comes.

The book has quite a bit of depth where it is needed, but it also manages to keeps it short and simple in the examples.

There is a bit of humor in the book, I like it and it keeps the book from getting a bit dry.

Conclusion

The book does its job in educating about VCS and also providing a reference.

Nowhere in the book does it come over as a too much of a sales pitch for the product that the writer has created which is a very impressive thing because of the bias one has when talking about the product that he has created.

So go get it, it's free :)

Disclaimer

I'm not associated with SourceGear in any way.

Using T4 templates to manage assembly version information

VagifAbilov — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:35:12 GMT

I wanted to configure version information generation for some .NET projects. It’s been a long time since I investigated available options, so I searched around hoping to find some simple way of doing this. What I’ve found didn’t look very encouraging: people write Visual Studio add-ins and custom MsBuild tasks just to obtain one integer number (okay, maybe two). This felt overkill for a small personal project.

The inspiration came from one of the StackOverflow discussions where somebody suggested that T4 templates could do the job. And of course they can. The solution requires a minimal effort and no Visual Studio or build process customization. Here what should be done:

1. Create a file with extension ".tt" and place there T4 template that will generate AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes:

<#@ template language="C#" #>
// 
// This code was generated by a tool. Any changes made manually will be lost
// the next time this code is regenerated.
// 

using System.Reflection;

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.1.<#= this.RevisionNumber #>")]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.1.<#= this.RevisionNumber #>")]
<#+
    int RevisionNumber = (int)(DateTime.UtcNow - new DateTime(2010,1,1)).TotalDays;
#>

You will have to decide about version number generation algoritm. For me it was sufficient to auto-generate a revision number that is set to the number of days since January 1st, 2010. As you can see, the version generation rule is written in plain C#, so you can easily adjust it to your needs.

2. The file above should be placed in one of the projects. I created a new project with just this single file to make version management technique clear. When I build this project (actually I don’t even need to build it: saving the file is enough to trigger a Visual Studio action), the following C# is generated:

// 
// This code was generated by a tool. Any changes made manually will be lost
// the next time this code is regenerated.
// 

using System.Reflection;

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.1.113")]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.1.113")]

Yes, today it’s 113 days since January 1st, 2010. Tomorrow the revision number will change.

3. Next step is to remove AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes from AssemblyInfo.cs files in all projects that should share the same auto-generated version information. Instead choose “Add existing item” for each projects, navigate to the folder with T4 template file, select corresponding “.cs” file and add it as a link. That will do!

What I like about this approach is that it is lightweight (no custom MsBuild tasks), and auto-generated version information is not added to source control. And of course using C# for version generation algorithm opens for algorithms of any complexity.

Source code in the cloud

VagifAbilov — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 22:13:08 GMT

It’s difficult to resist giving a try to Git or Mercurial these days, and I decided to start moving the code of my personal projects to DVCS. I’ve chosen Bitbucket as a remote storage for my repositories. It seems to have very good reputation, and it’s subscription plans include a free plan for a single private repository (up to 1 GB) with upgrades starting as low as $5 a month.

I am just making my first steps with Mercurial, so I read Joel Spolsky’s Hg Init introduction, but Bitbucket also contains guidelines that make setting up repository a simple excercise.

It’s easy enough to manage source control using Hg commands, but TortoiseHg installs a Windows shell extension that turns Windows Explorer into a source control management tool.

And finally, for those spoilt by Visual Studio source control integration, VisualHG is a Mercurial plug-in for Visual Studio.

I installed all of the above packages and was surprised how quickly I was up and running my source against remote Mercurial repository at Bitbucket. And I definitely enjoy the experience. Comparing to TFS I like the mobile nature of my local sources. Like every centralized version control system, TFS prefers its users to be connected. You can bring your projects offline, but this is considered to be a temporary state. As soon as you can connect to TFS, you are supposed to do it so it can synchronize your changes. Distributed version control systems have different phylosophy, there are no connected and disconnected users, and you can work and commit your changes locally and only push them to a remote repository for planned release or synchronization.

One thing for sure: no more source control at home. In 1993 I bought a Microsoft Delta license for my personal use. Later I upgraded it to SourceSafe (at that time not yet “Visual”). All this time I had source code repository on one of my home machines. No more. “hg push” command will make Bitbucket take care of my source.

Back to basics: Getting started (Source Control: SVN/Git)

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:13:37 GMT

Prelude

This will hopefully be the start of a series of posts / articles about the basic information/skills needed for different software development.

Source Control

Source control is one of the things you need to set up before starting to do the actual development.

Before creating things of value it's wise to make sure that your investment is guarded.

Source control is there for this need.
Not only can it be used to keep your source code and files safe but it will also allow you to keep different revisions of files available so you can revert to any other version of the files.

This can be great for going back to the way things worked in version x or the way things looked in version y.

More information on Source control / Revision control.

Source Control: Tutorials / Lingo

Since this is very nicely explained by others I will just link to some tutorials by others:

Different Source Control providers

There are a lot of different source control system a brief overview:

Visual Sourcesafe: free solution by Microsoft, this one is not really recommended by most people
Sourcegear Vault: commercial solution created by Sourcegear to be Sourcesafe done right.
SVN: Free open source source control and the default Source Control solution nowadays
Git: The new source control kid on the block

For me the most interesting source control solutions at the moment are:
SVN / Git

So I will go into these options some more but first lets have a look at a comparison between SVN and Git.

SVN

How to set it up on windows.
How to use it on a daily basis.
A free book about SVN.

Git

Daily usage of Git.
Git commit policies.

Source control hosting options

If you want to get started with source control but you don't want to take ages to set up a server and things like that there is also the option, for going for a hosted option.

There are a lot of different hosting options for SVN, there are also a lot of options coming up for Git hosting.

Some are free others aren't the ones I've tried:

Unfuddle
Assembla
Springloops

And all looked well.

Here is also a comparsion list of different Source control hosters.

Conclusion

Source Control should be the first thing you think of before starting to develop, with this article I hope to have given the readers a head start on how to go about actually using it in a correct way and getting started.

Using Workflows to visually construct project Build/Compilation flows.

dotgrid — Sat, 19 May 2007 22:43:00 GMT

Code [Here]

I happen to participate in an agile workshop where some automated build tools were discussed ,visual build was one of them. I liked the idea of visually constructing the project build instead of using batch files or VS IDE build actions that are hard to execute or to maintain. In "visual build" you simply visually drag and drop activity blocks from a tool box to construct the build process. I wanted have my own "Visual Build Designer" , and it was very obvious that I can utilize Windows Workflow to do that.

My basic required activity blocks were:

Extract the latest version from Source Control [VSTF]
Build the project
Send an email with the results

Another requirement was that the process builder (the actual person that drags and drops the activity blocks) would not have to write a single line of code. He would have to set in the activity blocks properties of course , but he wouldn't actually need to add additional c#/vb.net to support the basic functionality.

So the first step was to read about writing customized activities . This was a good resource to start.

The second step was to read about extracting code from VSTF source control. Here is a good place to start.

Next step was to write the customized activities.

I wrote three customized activities

A source control code extractor - GetCode.cs
An MSBuild executer - MSBuild.cs
A mailer - Mailer.cs

here is how (in short) the GetCode.cs imports the source control

String tfsName = TFSServer;
TeamFoundationServer tfs = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer(tfsName);
VersionControlServer versionControl = (VersionControlServer)tfs.GetService(typeof(VersionControlServer));
Workspace workspace = null;
workspace = versionControl.CreateWorkspace(WORKSPACENAME, versionControl.AuthenticatedUser);
WorkingFolder myworkingfolder = new WorkingFolder(TFSArea, SCPath);
workspace.CreateMapping(myworkingfolder);
workspace.Get();
versionControl.DeleteWorkspace(WORKSPACENAME, versionControl.AuthenticatedUser);

The TFSServer,tfsName and SCPath are activity properties which are defined as so in the code
public static DependencyProperty SCPathProperty = DependencyProperty.Register
("SCPath", typeof(string), typeof(GetCode));

[Description("The local folder to get the code")]
[Category("Dependency Properties")]
[Browsable(true)]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Visible)]
public string SCPath
{
get{return Convert.ToString(base.GetValue(SCPathProperty));}
set{base.SetValue(SCPathProperty, value);}

and that makes them visible in the designer like so

[WF1.jpg]

So here are the properties of all of the components

GetCode - VSTF Server, Source Control area path, and the path to dump the files into
MSBuilder - MSBuilde exe path, Project path and Project file name
Mailer - To, Subject, Body , SMTPHost

Now all that's left is to open a new workflow project, add these activities to the tool box , drag them into the designer window and finally bind the properties of the activities.

The binding are as follows:

The msbuilder ProjectPath property is binded to the getCode SCPath property, which means that the msbuilder looks at the same directory where the source controller brought the code to.
The Mailer branch is binded to the the MSbuilder BuildResult property , if the build succeeded than the BuildResult Property would be set to true and the successful branch would be taken and vice versa.
The mailer Body Property is binded to the MSBuild BuildOutput property which means that the emails body contents would actually be the output of the MSBuild process.

All of the other properties (such as TO, SMTPHost , subject , etc) would be have to be set by the process builder (the person using it)

That's basically it, all that's left to do is to run the process and wait for the result email.

Build Failed Email

Build Success Email

Next steps would be to to add more build related activities such as publish(some kind of xcopy), ftp , package, etc.

Which I hope to accomplish soon.

Any Feedbacks ? Can you think of other build related activities that would be valuable ?

Roiy

Code [Here]