The Seapine View

We’ve been hard at work the past few months adding new features to Surround SCM. Shelving is the new feature that I’m particularly excited about. As a developer and a user of Surround SCM, I think this is one of the most exciting features we’ve added in the last few years. In fact, I’ve been using shelves daily since we installed Surround SCM 2011.1 on our in-house server.

A shelf is a container on the Surround SCM Server that is used to store files from a local working directory. Files do not need to be version controlled by Surround SCM to be put on a shelf, they just need to reside in a working directory. You can have as many shelves as you want. Each shelf has a single owner who can modify the contents and, optionally, a group of shared users who can view the contents. The shelf owner can hand it to another user by changing its owner. You can also shelve and unshelve any number of files as often as you need to without having to create a new shelf each time.

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I’ll come right out and say it, I’m a shortcut junkie. The more shortcuts I master, the more productive I become. This morning I realized that I needed a shortcut to launch the Surround SCM GUI. After a quick Google search I discovered that there are a lot of methods to do this, so I’m going to show you the one I found easiest. Continue reading…

I’ve been a member of the Surround SCM team for nearly a year and half (including my co-op) and there are still little features of Surround SCM I’ve never used or wasn’t aware of. Just this morning I was looking into a defect about the “Image Comparison” tool and it hit me – up until that point I had no idea Surround even had an image diff feature. So I started playing around with it and, as it turns out, it’s a nice little tool. I imagine it would be quite handy if you were a graphic designer or someone who spent a decent amount of time working with images.
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A week or so ago I was working on “owner code reviews” for changes made during the Surround SCM 2011.0 development process. Part of our code review process is that every source code file is “owned” by a developer and, when another developer makes a change to a file you own, you review it. While I was reviewing files it occurred to me that it would be really nice if the Surround SCM GUI Client had an “Open with Finder” or “Open with Explorer” option that made it easy to open a file with the default application configured for that the particular file extension. For example, Qt UI files would open with “Qt Designer”, header and source files (.h, .c, .cpp) would open with Xcode, etc.
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CLI parsing got you down? Good news, we’ve got an API for that. We introduced a cross-platform C API with Java and .NET wrappers in the Surround SCM 2010.0 release. All three versions of the API have the same functionality – anything you can do from the C API you can do from either Java or .NET. “What can I do with the API?”, you ask. Well,  you can Add a file, Checkin, Checkout, Get, Undo Checkout, Search, Create repository, Create branch, Promote, Rebase, Manage labels, Add user, Rollback files, Share, Break share, and much more.

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I worked on the C# API, which is really a wrapper for the C API, For the Surround SCM 2010.0 release. If you’ve ever written a wrapper or any type of “code layer” you know how important it is to keep up with changes made to the base layer. Surround SCM has a feature called “Email Notifications” that allows you to do just that. As you may have guessed, an email notification is just an email that is sent to you when a specified action takes place. Going back to my work on the C# API, to keep up with changes to the C API I set up an email notification to alert me anytime another user performed a change to a file in the API repository.

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For my first blog post I thought it would be a good idea to post about how I use Surround SCM. I always find it interesting to see how developers actually use the tools they develop. When I’m using Surround SCM on my Mac I prefer to use FileMerge. What is FileMerge, you ask? FileMerge is a free utility that comes bundled with the Apple Developer Tools, it allows you to view the differences between files, as well as merge the contents of different file versions. If you’ve done any development on a team, you know that a tool like this can be your Swiss Army knife.
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