Software Configuration Management (SCM) is one of the first skills a serious developer should master, after becoming proficient with his or her development tools of choice. Unfortunately this doesn't always happen because the subject of SCM is not commonly taught in academic or company training.
Although software is not a material thing, as you cannot touch it, smell it, or taste it, building software can be as complex as building physical things such as cars or planes, if not more so. The main difference between the two worlds lies in the limitations you confront. In the world of developing software there are no physical limitations—the only limit is your imagination.
However, all this freedom can have a downside. A good TV commercial once stated "Power is nothing without control"—if you do not control it wisely, it may start working against you. When developing software, you need to have a manageable team development effort, track and maintain the history of your projects, sustain parallel development on multiple product versions, fix bugs, and release service packs while further developing the applications.
This is where the concept of Software Configuration Management (SCM) comes into play, dealing among other things with source code versioning, tracking development evolution, building, and releasing. Putting it in simple terms, SCM is about getting the job done safer, faster, and better.
While trying to keep the theory to a minimum, this book starts by teaching you what SCM is, why it is important, and what benefits you get by using it, either by working individually or by being part of a team. You will find this part very valuable if you're new to the concept of SCM, because you will be setting your base for understanding what happens in the rest of the book.
Then the book concentrates on the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 2005 SCM tool and the best practices used to manage the development and evolution of Visual Studio .NET 2005 applications. You will learn the theory by going through a journey, in which we will actually develop a new application, starting from designing its specifications and ending with releasing it and completing the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
You will learn how the SCM concepts are applied by Visual SourceSafe 2005 by developing Orbital Hotel, a Service-Oriented Application hotel reservation system. You will learn how to use the team cooperation features in Visual SourceSafe 2005 with the help of John and Mary, two fictional team members who have been assigned to implement various project components.
The end of the book deals with SourceSafe administration tasks. It describes SourceSafe database creation, management, and maintenance, how to secure the database, how to create users and assign user rights, and how to manage projects and project settings.
Additional material on how to customize SourceSafe to suit your development style is available at http://www.packtpub.com/visual-sourcesafe-2005/book. You can visit Orbital Hotel online at http://orbitalhotel.alexandruserban.com/.
I hope you will find this book a great resource about Visual SourceSafe 2005, and I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Chapter 1 teaches you the basic terminology and concepts used in the SCM world, and how SCM integrates in the Software Development Lifecycle.
Chapter 2 introduces you to Microsoft's SCM tool for small and medium teams: Visual SourceSafe 2005. You'll learn what this product is made of, and what new features and improvements it has over the previous versions.
Chapter 3 introduces Orbital Hotel, a hotel-reservation system application, which will be used in the next chapters as a case study for developing Visual Studio applications with SourceSafe. We will see what the best structure for Visual Studio solutions is when working under Source Control.
Chapter 4 discusses the various ways you can add a software project to the SourceSafe database. This is the first step you'll take when starting to develop an application under Source Control.
Chapter 5 covers the Source Control operations used daily in our development activities. We'll set up a new workspace and get the solution from the SourceSafe database. Then, we will add new files to the solution, check them in, examine their history, and get latest versions. We will also explore the team-cooperation models and see what are the differences between them, their advantages and disadvantages, and operations such as item comparison, undoing changes, file merging and pinning, and conflict resolution.
Chapter 6 teaches you how to access the SourceSafe server through the intranet or the Internet, in order to perform the necessary Source Control tasks. If you don't have an internet connection at the remote location, or if the local SourceSafe server is temporarily down, you can work offline, provided you already have the solution files on your remote machine. When a connection to the database becomes available again, you reconnect to the SourceSafe database and synchronize the changes. Depending on the database configuration and the Visual Studio plug-ins you use while reconnecting, there are some scenarios to consider for avoiding data loss. We will examine the possible scenarios that can lead to data loss and see how to avoid such situations.
Chapter 7 teaches you how to manage the software development lifecycle using SourceSafe. In the evolution of software products there are many milestones. We will see how to manage them using SourceSafe so that we can reproduce their specific configurations when needed. We will also talk about the build process and how a periodical build can catch integration problems early on. We will take a brief look at white-box and black-box tests and how they help in ensuring final product quality. Last but not the least, we will see how to maintain multiple product versions to be able to release service packs while continuing development towards the next versions.
Appendix A covers the installation steps for Visual SourceSafe 2005 and the configuration for remote access.
Appendix B describes how to perform SourceSafe database administration tasks such as creating and securing databases, managing database and Windows users, creating shadow folders, and configuring the services for the SourceSafe plug-ins in Visual Studio.
Appendix C discusses how to perform maintenance tasks on SourceSafe databases such as undoing user checkouts, changing the team version control model, locking, archiving, restoring, and running database maintenance tools.
Note
Additional material on Customizing Visual SourceSafe 2005 is available at http://www.packtpub.com/sourcesafe/book.
To follow this book you need Visual SourceSafe 2005, and Visual Studio .NET 2005 Standard edition or above.
This book is for .NET developers, testers, and configuration managers who:
Use Visual Studio .NET 2005 for building software
Want to use software configuration to manage their products in day-to-day activities
Want to improve their efficiency by learning to use the best practices with SourceSafe
Want to install, manage, and configure Visual SourceSafe 2005 for optimal operation
The book doesn't assume previous experience with any software configuration tool and is a great resource for people who want to start learning about this subject.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "In the third page we have to specify the LAN network path to the database shared folder that contains the srcsafe.ini file."
A block of code will be set as follows:
/// <summary>
/// Updates the room database with the information in the room
/// parameter
/// </summary>
/// <param name="rooms">The RoomDataTable object containing
/// the information to be updated</param>
public void UpdateRooms(RoomDS.RoomDataTable rooms)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}
Any command-line input and output is written as follows:
selfssl.exe /N:CN=vss.alexandruserban.com /T /V:365
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "The path can be entered manually or by using the Browse button to browse the network for the specific path."
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