SourceGear Vault

asp:review

SourceGear Vault

Now you've got a good alternative to Visual SourceSafe.

By Jonathan Goodyear

Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe (VSS) often has beenconsidered the red-headed stepchild of the Visual Studio suite. Despite itsimportance to collaborative development efforts, the stability, performance,and quality of the VSS product is suspect. Many of Microsoft's own projectsdon't even use it.

For a couple of years now, SourceGear Corp. has beenselling a product named SourceOffSite that allows remote access to VSS viaHTTP. Despite efforts to improve the performance and overall experience of VSSthrough data compression, SourceGear eventually came to the conclusion that itneeded to break away from its dependence on VSS as the version control repositoryfor its product.

This spring, SourceGear has emerged from its softwaredevelopment lab with an entirely new version-control product, named Vault.According to Eric W. Sink, SourceGear's chief executive officer, Vault is "asource-control system designed to be a seamless replacement for MicrosoftVisual SourceSafe." What does Vault offer that is so innovative? For starters,SourceGear has improved upon its proprietary data-compression technology, sodevelopers that need to check files in and out of an extended WAN or VPNenvironment will enjoy a more responsive interface. Vault transmits only filechanges, so there are fewer bytes to transfer over the wire.

Another big advantage Vault has over VSS is support foratomic transactional operations. When checking a large number of files in orout of a Vault repository, the entire operation either succeeds or is rolledback - a feature VSS doesn't support. If problems occur during a largeoperation in VSS, repository corruption is the likely outcome. Vault avoidsthis by leveraging SQL Server 2000 as the engine for its version-controlrepository. You also can use MSDE to house the Vault repository. With the powerand robustness of SQL Server 2000, Vault can handle extremely largerepositories with ease.

Those of you who have large VSS repositories already willbe glad to hear that Vault comes with a rock-solid migration utility that moves100 percent of the VSS repository features over to the Vault repositoryplatform. This includes all the version-control history, labels, and foldersharing that happened even before you switched to Vault. All existing VSSlogins and permissions are migrated over to the Vault platform, as well.

Vault has been tested to work with both the Visual Studio.NET and Visual Studio 6.0 IDEs. SourceGear is a member of Microsoft's VisualStudio Integration Program, and the entire Vault product was built using C# andthe .NET Framework, ensuring it falls in line with Microsoft's technologyplatform direction.

Aside from its integration with Visual Studio, Vault alsocomes with a standard Internet Explorer-type interface (see Figure 1). Itssimilarity in form and function to VSS means Vault's learning curve is almostzero for anyone who has ever used VSS. You also can access a Vault repositoryvia its native Web Services interface. SourceGear supplies a wrapper class thatmakes programmatic access to a Vault repository relatively painless.Programmatic access to a Vault repository is useful for building automatedbuild scripts. The Vault Explorer application consumes these Web Services aswell, so the entire Vault API is available for your build scripts and customapplications to consume.

Figure 1. The Vault Explorer looks much like the VSS Explorer. WhenVault Explorer first loads, you are prompted for a server name, user ID, andpassword for your Vault Server, instead of for the path to a srcsafe.ini file.The Vault Explorer doesn't have to contend with the Visual Studio .NETintegration hooks, so it tends to perform much better in slow networkconditions.

Jonathan Goodyear is president of ASPSoft (http://www.aspsoft.com),an Internet consulting firm based in Orlando, Fla. He's a Microsoft CertifiedSolution Developer (MCSD) and author of Debugging ASP.NET (New Riders). Jonathanalso is a contributing editor for asp.netPRO. E-mail him at mailto:[email protected] or through hisangryCoder eZine at http://www.angryCoder.com.

asp:factfile

SourceGear Corp.

3200 Farber Drive

Champaign, IL 61822

Rating:

Phone: (877) 356-0106; (217) 356-0105

E-mail: mailto:[email protected]

Web Site: http://www.sourcegear.com

Price: $999 with SQLlicenses; $599 without SQL Licenses

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