Branch-per-task easily

Thursday, February 22, 2007 Daniel Peñalba best practices , branching 0 Comments

Now, PlasticSCM's main window shows more information it its status bar. So, it is easy to know where I am working:

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.

Branch-Release diagram

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Dave branch explorer 2 Comments

We have been actively working on yet another view for Plastic. This is an old one, the branch diagram, capable of showing a global view of the status of the development.



Well, in Plastic, there is an important difference with traditional tools like cvs, subversion or perforce. We don't copy (of soft copy) all elements in every new branch. In contrast, we provide a mechanism called branch inheritance. Here, a new branch does not contain anything until a revision is created on it, the rest of the items being inherited from the parent branch. This gives numerous advantages over traditional "soft copy" model, being able to use hierarchies for managing development complexities, and then promoting changes as they go through the different development stages.


So our 3D version tree displays the history of a single item, which won't normally be present on all branches, only on those where it was modified. On the other hand, the new branch - release diagram displays all branches and their relations, for instance, when items have been merged (or promoted) from task branches to mainline.

In these screenshots (using aqua style on windows :-P) we are showing a branch per task pattern (we have around 1500 branches in our repository at this moment), as well as rebases and merges.

You can even use the new integration with task-management tools. Here in the shot, you can see the integration with our internal task control tool (TTS) which I already talked about in another post. This integration is also working with other tools like OnTime, versionOne or Jira.

Plastic SCM running on SLED / Mono

Monday, February 19, 2007 Pablo Santos 1 Comments

Finally! It took some time, but we are now able to announce a full featured, Linux based, Plastic SCM release. We have been running Plastic server on Linux for months (there are even clients using it already), but the GUI client needed some of the improvements made on the latest Mono release.
Would you like to see it in action? Watch the following video, showing an SLED Plastic GUI client browsing our source code repository (yes, Plastic browsing Plastic). Most of the graphical capabilities are shown, like the 3D version tree.


The diff tool for images also works nice on Mono / Linux, as the next screencast shows.


But don't get confused by its beautiful face. Plastic is not just graphics, it is a full featured SCM system as powerful as Clearcase, Accurev and the like. Features like:

• Real renaming
• Full directory versioning
• Repository level ACLs
• Its own diff and three-way merge tool (also running on Linux)
• Merge tracking
• Branch inheritance
• Full workspace configuration thanks to selectors
• Customizable SQL based repositories (Firebird, SQL Server and Postgres)

make Plastic much, much more than a nice GUI.

If you want to try it we have just uploaded a Open SUSE VMWare image with a Plastic release preview installed. Take into account that it is still a pre-release, there are some limitations (branch creation from the GUI, for instance) due to Mono missing features.

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.

Visual Studio 2005 version control Integration

Thursday, February 15, 2007 Pablo Santos news , visual studio 0 Comments

We are often asked how Plastic can be integrated with Visual Studio 2005. Well, Plastic is currently fully integrated with VS. In fact we are supporting even so called advanced features like moving and renaming files and folders.

If you want to see Plastic in action running from VStudio check the following screencast.

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.

New Eclipse Plug-In features

Monday, February 12, 2007 Daniel Peñalba eclipse , news 0 Comments

This week we are developing new features for Eclipse integration:

• Modified team menus for better usability
• New feature "diff with previous"
• Threadsafe diff and tree
• Move and rename, and delete support
• Auto checkout preference added
• Refactoring support
• Spanish translation

Some snapshots...

To change eclipse language, do the following:

To launch Eclipse in other language, do the following:

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.

SCM - Task integration

Wednesday, February 07, 2007 Dave best practices 6 Comments

We are working on the integration of the workflow engine in our GUI tool and, as a nice side effect we have the GUI extension API. One of the benefits of this integration is the ability to write simple extensions to connect to your favourite task/issue tracking tool like bugzilla, version one, OnTime, MS project or, in our case, TTS.

Here are some shots. The first one shows the branches view, with a 'branch per task' pattern, and the descriptions of the tasks associtated with branches. Tooltip on a branch shows extended task information, and there is a context menu option that shows the task in the web browser.

This one shows the tasks associated with the revisions, in the history view:

This sample extension is just 200 lines of code!

Here, the shortcut to the task (in the web application) through the context menu:

Visual Studio Plug In

Friday, February 02, 2007 mdepedro 0 Comments

Visual Studio 2003 users will be familiar with the following limitation: due to backwards compatibility with Visual SourceSafe, it is not possible to rename or move files inside the IDE.

Nevertheless, on version 2005, the IDE does support this functionality. VS2005 notifies the source control system about the moved and renamed items.

We made some fixes on the plugin to better support this functionality, and they are available since release BL047.5. Indeed if you have a look into Visual Studio integration, you will see how many other SCMs don't support moving and renaming yet. Just check Perforce, SurroundSCM, AccuRev, Hansky ...

The coming releases will improve VS integration, so we expect to make IDE users experience with Plastic even easier.

The improved VSS Plugin has some more benefits: now MSAccess version control integration is fully supported. You would only have to instal an Add-in provided by Microsoft, and install Plastic´s Visual Studio Plug In to start controlling Access development under Plastic.