Ian’s Blog

With Memorial Day just around the corner, we’re entering the season where I inevitably endure comments from friends and family with respect to my tan, or lack thereof. So in an effort to prevent the shock and awe the apparently occurs when I don a pair of shorts, I present this guide.

Wow. Self-employment has made Jeff bold! Incendiary, even.

We Don’t Use Software That Costs Money Here:

It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.

If Vista decides, one more time, that the appropriate columns when looking at a folder full of C# source code is Artists, Album, Genre, and Rating, I’m going to go postal. I keep fixing it, and everything’s fine for a few weeks, and then it does it again. Yes. I have SP1 installed.

This morning I searched Google for “Vista folder view f***ed” (without the stars) and, amusingly, the second result led me to a fix. I’ve removed from the registry all the folder-specific view settings that Vista oh-so-cleverly remembered on my behalf. If it actually did this competently, that would be one thing, but if it’s just going to confuse itself every few weeks, I’ve got better ways to spend my time. So I’ve also turned off the “remember each folder’s settings” option. Call me crazy, but when looking at a list of files I actually want to see file-like information like size, date, and attributes. I genuinely miss Windows NT 3.5’s file explorer sometimes.

I’ll be 31 this year. Perhaps I’ve already begun the slow decline to cranky old geek. Soon I’ll be looked at by fresh-faced college kids the same way I looked at the graybeards reminiscing about core memory and punch cards.

I’m reading Cryptonomicon for the second time, having rediscovered it on a basement shelf and remembering that I really enjoyed it years ago. Last night I got to this part, when Randy’s trying to crack the Arethusa intercepts from his Manila jail cell:

“Who framed me, then?” Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls to the wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as nothing more than a perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you’d go away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say something. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for information.

Obviously any book that contains the phrase “pure balls to the wall nerdism” is probably good. An author who writes entertaining fiction and knows the software developer’s mindset this well is rare. Hilarity ensues. I can’t say that I’m proud of these moments, but what professional software developer hasn’t been there? Of course, I’d have to substitute an “oblivious coworker” for the “incredibly powerful billionaire,” making the caricature even more painful.

Last night we released a beta version of Vault 4.1 and Fortress 1.1. The big changes include:

• Visual Studio 2008 support
• Tags in Fortress

A more exhaustive list of changes is here.

If you’ve been trying out the 4.0.5 beta, you might be interested to know what we’ve fixed since its release. Almost all of the changes are in the Visual Studio 2005-integrated client. They are:

• Adding an existing unbound project to an existing bound solution now works correctly.
• Projects that are pending addition no longer always give a spurious working folder error on startup.
• Added help for the “Add Solution to Vault” and “Change Vault Bindings” dialogs.
• Fixed a bug where the path to web site projects was not always correctly determined in the Change Bindings dialog.
• Changed some text to make it more clear that you’re going offline: login dialog and working folder resolution.
• Adding a new web site project to a bound solution now gives a sane default repository location.
• Solutions and projects are now correctly reloaded when undoing a change from the pending changes window.
• Log out from the repository now happens correctly when closing your solution after it had been automatically reloaded due to a get or revert.
• Get Latest and Checkout commands are now enabled when only a child file (e.g. a designer or code-behind file) is selected.
• Fixed the weird availability of the “Open From Vault” command. It’s now always available when we’re the active source control provider.

These will be in 4.0.5 final, due out Real Soon Now.

We’ve made a beta version of Vault 4.0.5/Fortress 1.0.5 publicly available.

Most of the changes in this release are in the Visual Studio integrated client, for which it’s the biggest release since 4.0/1.0. People using that client should definitely check it out.

Noteworthy changes to the Visual Studio client include:

• There is a new binding management dialog that allows people with more sophisticated binding requirements to work effectively. It’s now possible to have an unbound solution and bound projects, for example.
• Get Latest has been significantly improved. Specifically, it’s no longer necessary to perform the command twice when files have been added to a solution or project. You also no longer get annoying “This file has changed, reload?” prompts.
• The bin folder in web site projects is now handled correctly. (Rejoice.)
• Solutions having projects that aren’t beneath them in the file system are handled significantly better.
• Solutions having multiple Business Intelligence projects now work.
• The performance of Add Solution has significantly improved.
• Linked file checkouts are handled better.
• The pending change list better reflects checkout status.
• Session restarts are handled better.

The full release notes are here. If you’re using the new Visual Studio 2005 client, or you’ve had trouble with it in the past, take a look!

Also, if you’re interested in other things happening in Vault/Fortress development, check out the SourceGear Development Blog.