Plastic is a Jolt Finalist!

Yes, Jolt Award 2009 Finalists have been announced and... Plastic SCM is one of them!!

Plastic is one of the 5 tools selected for the Change and Configuration Management category, together with systems like Accurev, OpenMake or TeamCity to mention a few.

Codice is a very young company, so just being on the list is great for us. The Jolt nomination has been an incredible Christmas present for the team.

We work hard to make Plastic the best version control system out there, and we know there's always lots of work to do, lots of competitors (bigger than us) doing a very good job, so is nice to see how Plastic is making its way through.

Plastikers, enjoy this and... happy 2009!

Merge to live, live to merge

I've just published a new post explaining the basics of merging on the DDJ guru's blog.

I'm writing a series or articles describing the very basics of merging since I still find people afraid of merging (and lock-prone) very often.

Here are the links:

Part I

Part II

Stay tuned!

Plastic on Solaris 10

Well, it's been a *real* pain to build mono on Solaris 10!! Compared to this building in OpenSolaris was veeeery easy.

I'll try to repeat the process in the coming days and try to create a detailed guide. Building libgdiplus was specially painful, but I guess I've been doing something wrong (I hope!).

And then, finally, a real "back to the future" screenshot here:



I used to love this beauty about ten years ago, and now it doesn't look that nice anymore (although I still like it :-D).

And another screenshot, this time with a most modern look & feel:



I love Solaris, so being able to run the Plastic GUI there is some sort of Christmas present for me... :-) I love Solaris since I started reading the Jim Mauro articles about threading and so on, and later his great book about internals.

But, to be honest, after being using Mac OS X (10.4 & 10.5) for the last three years (and almost on a daily basis during the last weeks) it's clear there's a message for the Solaris folks out there: hire a graphics designer! (ok, if you have one... fire him and hire a new one!!)

So, what's next? Ok, there's only one OS I like better than Solaris... OpenBSD! So stay tuned..

OpenSolaris and MWF

Finally! We've Plastic SCM 2.7 GUI running on OpenSolaris! You know Plastic GUI is heavily based on Mono WinForms, don't you? Ok, then check what Mono WinForms can do...



Click on the image or here to watch a screencast and see it in action.

Enjoy!

White testing Plastic

Ever heard of White? You should.

White is a promising testing framework based on the UI Automation APIs which enables you to write tests in C# (or your favorite .NET language).

Why is it interesting? I think there're several reasons but, for me, the main ones are:

Developers can write GUI tests as they'd write unit tests: from their own development environment, in their language of choice. It makes a huge difference.

Tests can be integrated with NUnit, or, in our case, with PNUnit, the distributed extension to NUnit which has been integrated in NUnit 2.5 (we run our test suites on several variations of Linux, Windows and MacOS (including x86 and PPC)).

What to see it in action? Watch the following screencast of White testing Plastic:

Distributed development with Plastic

Distributed development has been introduced in Plastic in release 2.5, but now with 2.7 we make it even easier to use because it jumps from the command line to the GUI.

The main difference is that now replicating branching branches back and forth is just a click away although good-ol CLI scripting still allows you to rapidly automate stuff using the cm replicate command.

This screencast explains in detail how a simple distributed working workflow can work with Plastic.



You can always check the distributed development user's guide for more information, but watching the video will be probably faster... :-)