Source Control from Hell
Everything I'm about to discuss is complete fiction and bears no resemblance to reality - at least that's my story and I'm sticking with it.
There's a product out there that begins with “Source” doesn't end with “Safe” but a word that's synonomous with the opposite of OnSite. I have never seen a product that I hate as much as it. I mean if you ever think SourceSafe is a pain - try this crap and have some real fun.
This week alone I've lost 4 hours because of it. It's really cool because a lot of times it just freezes up in the middle of pulling over a project. Sometimes it leaves your files in a half locked state and you have to completely restart IIS. Other times it works fine, until of course more than 1 person tries connecting to it at once. We now have a policy where we have to send out an email to everyone on the team and announce when you're going to pull something down and when you're done. As goofy as it sounds, it's actually a feasible solution and has helped out immensely.
Looks like the problem is that Source Offline wraps a bunch of COM calls w/ P/Invoke - so even though it's multithreaded, it doesn't matter because the server isn't.
Today I had a wonderful day. I'm right up against a BIG deadline and all was pretty much on schedule. I decided to stay late b/c no one in the government will ever be in the office working after 5:00 and most of the folks I worked with were taking the kids Trick Or Treating. So that meant I could go pull down all the latest builds of everything and get ahead. But NO. Right in the middle of pulling down a rather large project w/ Get Latest Version, the Server connection closed, popped up an error message and caused VS.NET to freeze. I went and took a dump and came back 20 minutes later and it was still hung. So I had to kill VS.NET. When I got it back up, two of the files I was working on since noon were corrupted! Yep, couldn't even open them in the designer. So I had to go back and revert to the previous version which effectively set me back about 6 hours. The creators of this hellish project need to be included in my prayer list...
On a brighter note, my new SPOT Watch arrived today and I finally got it up and running. I had one a year ago when they first came out but I lived in Augusta where the only thing you can get is Sweet Tea, Grits and Church. Hence no coverage. So I gave it to a friend who could use it. Greenville, SC is about 10000000000 lightyears ahead of Augusta and fortunately it has coverage. This one is cooler than my old one too - I even see a section for Programs which is intriguing. I KNOW for a fact that there are people writing programs for the CLR right now and my one man goal is to pull this off. Sure, I doubt Remoting is supported or MSMQ and I doubt you can run a Biztalk orchestration on it, but I don't really need to do any of that at the moment and the best part is that surely Source Offhell won't ever be able to run on it which is reason enough to buy one.
KC had a good post a while back about how Portable Media Center and SPOT both have the ability to run programs but Gen1 of either of them doesn't let you access it - hence he wasn't buying either until that point. Well, I totally respect his viewpoint but I have very little of substance in my life so purchasing expensive toys gives my life meaning. And now I can check my email from my phone, my PDA or my watch. The only bad part is that I haven't gotten much but spam lately. Maybe I need to write some more political stuff because for some reason, that seems to generate a lot of traffic.
Casey was right again on this - you can write about technology all day long and you may or may not get a post or two. Write about politics, stippers, religion or post pictures of your girlfriend's butt, and viola - traffic. Weird phenomenon indeed.