The Seapine View

It’s well known that Surround SCM is a pretty flexible and forgiving source control tool from a developer’s perspective. What is less well known is how flexible and forgiving it is for administrators.

The technical publications team here uses MadCap Flare to produce our user guides and help files. We also use Surround SCM for versioning and managing the doc review process. Since Flare is Windows-only and I’m a on a Mac, I frequently run it in VMware Fusion.
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SD Times recognized Seapine in the application lifecycle management and software configuration management categories of their annual SD Times 100. Of 78 vendors spread across 14 categories, we were one of only 12 vendors recognized in more than one category.

Thank you Seapine customers for helping us achieve six consecutive years of success in the SD Times 100!

As Fernando wrote, switching computers is not so much fun.  If you ever need to export/import your Surround SCM settings to another PC this might help out some. Of course these are Windows only instructions, as Grant will point out, I use pico, so I’m not much help in *nix world.
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Recently I had some computer issues that forced me to change computers. I’m sure most of you have gone through something like this, and let’s face it, it’s not fun. IT was able to put the hard drive from my old computer on an external enclosure so I could transfer my files.

Tedious work.

I decided to make the best of it. This was a chance for me to only bring in files that I really need.  My wife (sorry ladies) accuses me of being a pack rat, and sometimes I think she is right. Especially when it comes to files. You never know when I might need this file, or when I will need to re install this utility I found on the net. After a couple of years of this, I have been fighting the constant battle for disk space.  So I decided that instead of blindly copying everything to my new shiny hard drive and trying to get back to “normal”, I would take the time to go through the files and only save what I truly need.

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Here are a couple of tools I plug-in into Surround SCM to make my life a little easier.

WinMerge & Surround SCM

Surround SCM ships with Guiffy, a really nice cross platform diff/merge tool.  Here is a good KB article about using Guiffy. While Guiffy is a great tool, I’ve always been a WinMerge guy, it’s what I’m comfortable with and we all know merging can be scary.
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When companies look to invest in defect tracking and version control tools one of the first questions they frequently ask is “Do you integrate into Microsoft Visual Studio?”

This might seem like a very easy question to answer because, in short, the answer is almost always “Yes we do”.

But once people start to use the integration they normally have a ton of questions on how it works and how they would like it to work. I use Visual Studio 2008, Surround SCM, and TestTrack Pro on a daily basis so I decided to show some of the integration images with real files and bugs, as I believe that pictures speak a thousand words.
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A few weeks back I had a conversation with a customer and one of our sales representatives about Surround SCM and file shares.

At the end of the call we reviewed our notes, and the sales rep asked me about shares in Surround SCM, specifically how they work under the hood.

Without hesitation, I found myself creating a drawing on the whiteboard that easily explained how shares work. Honestly, I was amazed that I never thought of this before.  Seemed like an easy way to explain how shares work.
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For performing peer code reviews, there isn’t a better tool than Smart Bear Software’s Code Collaborator. Even if you already have a working solution, their free book “Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review“ is a great read.

Code Collaborator 5.0 is in beta and SmartBear has added direct support for our version control tool, Surround SCM. You can learn about Code Collaborator 5.0′s new features and download the beta at their web site. If you don’t already use Surround SCM, you can get a free single-user license.

Fernando Cremer recently crafted a .NET utility in C# that you can use to search for text strings in Surround SCM databases. Search results are displayed in sscm:// format, giving you the ability to automatically select the file in your Surround SCM client and then view its file history, check it out, view it, etc. It’s available in Seapine Labs and full source code is included. Check it out.

Fernando Cremer, one of the terrific Solution Consultants in our Services group, has created a very interesting sample application that can answer this question. It shows the changes in the source files associated with a list of issues. Notice I said changes in the source files, not just the list of files that have changed.

You might find Fernando’s application handy when you are getting ready to promote changes to production, or you want to do a quick review of what went into the latest build, or when you want to satisfy your curiosity about which code review “suggestions” were actually followed.

Sample report output

The SCC_File_Diff_Report_Utility takes advantage of the integration between TestTrack Pro and Surround SCM. It uses TestTrack’s SOAP interface and Surround SCM’s Command Line Interface (CLI) to do its magic. If you are so inclined, Fernando has kindly made the SCC_File_Diff_Report_Utility source code available on the Seapine Labs site so you can make this report look however you want.

Seapine Labs

Speaking of which, Seapine Labs at http://labs.seapine.com/ is a very useful site to bookmark. It has lots of interesting tips and ideas that can expand your usage of Seapine products. It’s an incubation site that lets us share our experiments and works in progress with users. One warning. This is not production code! Use what you find, learn from it, but please don’t get upset if you find bugs.

I’ll be covering other interesting stuff from the TestTrack section of Seapine Labs in future posts. Surround SCM users should check out Life on Mars, courtesy of Jeff Amfahr, Surround SCM’s product manager, for additional Seapine Labs goodness for Surround SCM users.

Hey, have you created an interesting TestTrack SOAP application? Even if you can’t share your source code, we’d love to hear about what you’ve done!