Saturday 29 May 2004

Korby reckons Windows will use VS Team System

"For larger teams and those who require integrated work item tracking and other software configuration management features, we've got a shiny, new Team Foundation server that we think you (AND the Microsoft Windows development team) will be using for many years to come." -- Korby Parnell.

Actually, the post was mainly about Visual SourceSafe, a product I cannot in conscience recommend to anyone. Any tool whose Best Practice guide recommends that you run a scheduled repair utility, so that the database corruption doesn't grow excessive, is just poor - particularly one you're relying on for your core business assets. Now, in fairness, a lot of the corruption experienced by many people is down to the usual culprits: flaky hardware, bad implementations of network file sharing in Windows 9x. Fundamentally, though, you have multiple remote clients modifying the same files - which has traditionally also caused problems for Microsoft Access - with no decent blocking lock support.

We know that Microsoft were using an internal system before Windows 2000 that basically forced a serialised development style; when it went into the final stabilisation stage, and the team were beginning to look towards Whistler (eventually Windows XP/Server 2003), they started to use a new internal system called SourceDepot (Source: Mark Lucovsky's USENIX presentation "Windows: A Software Engineering Odyssey" [PPT, HTML version]). Rumour has it (never officially confirmed) that SourceDepot is derived from a Perforce source-code license. It's a pretty good bet that Microsoft aren't allowed to sub-license their mods to anyone else.

VS Team System's version control component (code-name Hatteras) looks surprisingly (but no doubt superficially) like SourceGear Vault, from a descriptive point-of-view. Eric Sink (CEO of SourceGear) indicates the impact he thinks this will have on Vault (basically, innocent bystander caught in the cross-fire between IBM's ClearCase and Microsoft). So MS may be continuing in their long-standing tradition of dog-fooding - or Windows may have again grown out of its source control solution.

However, the future looks decidedly dim for SourceGear's SourceOffSite - similar features appear to be destined to appear in VSS 2005.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Something tells me that Eric Sink will come up with a new kick-arse product, so I wouldn't be too worried :-)

Ian

Mike Dimmick said...

SourceGear's bug-tracking solution, Dragnet, is due fairly soon - http://software.ericsink.com/20040514.html#10168.

Anonymous said...

pitty the "Best Practices" guide link appears to be broken,...

Colin

Mike Dimmick said...

Should be fixed. I need to update BlogJet - it's a known bug.