Plastic SCM on Windows Vista

Friday, December 29, 2006 Daniel Peñalba 0 Comments

I finished installing the new Vista at home. The OS version was Vista Ultimate 64 bits. By default, Vista has a 64bit 2.0 framework version installed, so Plastic SCM can run with it.
But ... could Plastic SCM still run with framework 1.1? I thought that there would be some incompatibility problems between framework 1.1 and Vista x64. After install a framework update (SP1), the tool run with any problem. Here is the result:


Good yield and an improved aspect. Microsoft team have been a good work!!

Dani Peñalba

Yes! I was the first employee to join Codice!
I own the record in number of check-ins to the Plastic repository. And you can find me working on every single area of Plastic.
I'm also a professional guitar player and I like scuba diving, too. You can reach me at @danipen00.

MS Coder December Issue

Thursday, December 21, 2006 mdepedro news 0 Comments

Faithfull to our international spirit we are once more in MS Coder magazine, you can find our ad on December Issue!, we are on the back cover of the Spanish version and we appear as well on the French and German versions.

Hope you like it!

Howto: Enable Visual Styles in a VS2003 plugin or add-in

Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Daniel Peñalba 0 Comments

When you want to give XP visual style to a .NET application, you must call Application.EnableVisualStyles() method. But an additional call is needed, because a Framework bug. Some images in common controls under a ListView, are not shown. To avoid this bug you must use Application.DoEvents() after enable visual styles.

This is easy when you are developing a Windows standard application. But when you are developing a Visual Studio add-in (Visual Studio 2003) or a Office add-in, the perspective is different.

EnableVisualStyles is not compatible with Visual Studio 2003. It causes some crashes in the application. To enable XP visual styles, without affecting other applications, you can define an activation context, and the the XP themes affect only the appearance of your code.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830033

Here, there is more info about XP visual styles:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/xptheming.asp

Dani Peñalba

Yes! I was the first employee to join Codice!
I own the record in number of check-ins to the Plastic repository. And you can find me working on every single area of Plastic.
I'm also a professional guitar player and I like scuba diving, too. You can reach me at @danipen00.

Powered by Firebird

Sunday, December 17, 2006 Dave news 3 Comments

It's been already a long time, but I still remember when we decided we would use an standard database backend for Plastic SCM. At the moment it really looked like a risky decission (well, nowadays more and more SCMs are moving towards this option, so it seems we are not wrong... I will be able to sleep better from now on ;-P ), but there were many advantages like:
- We didn't have to care about the data storage's safety properties. This was really a huge step forward: using a RDBMS you get basic ACID properties... Nice for a version control system.
- Full transaction support. Today every serious version control system will provide "atomic commit operations". Well, using a RDBMS, again, you get it for free (ok, there is a nice layer on top of it, but this is another story...)

So, which database should we use? We didn't have a big amount of code yet, we were making some tests, prototipes and so on. And then we decided Firebird would be the way to go. Why? Well, we had some previous experience with Interbase (I still remember comparing its full serializable support against SQL 6.5 back at university) and later on with Firebird on Linux too.
We tried the embedded option and... well, it really rocks! A full featured database backend and you can redistribute it just copying some dlls. Simply put: great! Indeed, the greatest one out there.
So then we decided Firebird would be an important part of the product. And I can tell you this is one of the decissions we never regret. BTW we wanted to have a full portable data layer (in terms of DB independency), so we also tried with Postgres (specially on Linux and Solaris) and later on with SQL Server. Results? Firebird is the easiest to deploy and has a very good performance ratio (and we always find ways to tune it even further), Postgres is a bit faster in some operations but extremely slow dealing with BLOB data and SQL Server is faster but much harder to deploy. So we are proud to tell that Firebird is a center piece of Plastic SCM. In fact we are about to release the Linux based version and... finally we moved it away from Postgres to Firebird 2.0.
Thanks to the Firebird team!

Mono success story

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 Pablo Santos news 0 Comments

It's been already a couple of weeks since the people at Mono project decided to list Plastic as a Mono Success Story. Needless to say we felt really excited about it, and it's been really a pleasure for us to show up there. We still have to release the Linux/Mono PlasticSCM version (we are already using it internally), and we expect to make a full VMWare Linux image available to download too.
Being able to use Mono, specially on non-windows platforms, has been one of the key points to decide .NET as underlying technology. As the success story paper states, nowadays only multiplatform SCM solutions are considered by customers, so having one was key for us.
Thanks to the Mono team for their support!

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.