http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog Opinions on CM, software development, and process automation from Longacre. Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:43:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Release 1.4 of CruiseControl.NET includes a new Configuration Preprocessor. The great thing is that this provides a C preprocessor-like macro syntax, so projects can be made using relatively powerful templates. The bad thing is that it's new, and so there are some gotcha's laying around. I just found one: I ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/gotcha-xml-include-processing-in-cruisecontrolnet As a sort of follow-on to my post on doing Database CM Three Ways, I give you this presentation from Microsoft field rep Jim Blizzard. The presentation video goes over using the entire suite of Microsoft tools — go figure, right? But it is a good, solid introduction to ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/microsofts-take-on-database-change-management Table of Contents Manual list of changes Computed list of changes Longacre Deployment Management There are three ways to do change or configuration management of a database. Two of them are “traditional,” and the third is LDM. Let's look at them all. Manual list of changes SQL is by its nature a change language. The individual ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/database_cmthree_ways Database Change Management Database CM, like software CM, means different things to different people. From our perspective, though, it is about providing the same benefits to a development shop that SCM does, even when some or all of the development involves a database. Database CM is just SCM on a database, ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/database_cm Table of Contents Review of Guiffy SureMerge Editorial Notes Product Explanation Two-way Comparison Three-way Comparison Merging Directory Compare Features Jiff command-line utility SureMerge command-line utility HTML comparison reports International Character Encodings Java API Support Accuracy Performance Ease of Use Effectiveness Cost Conclusion Review of Guiffy SureMerge Editorial Notes Date: March 2006 Product: Guiffy SureMerge 7.2 “Dogwood” Vendor: Guiffy Software (http://www.guiffy.com) Reviewer: Austin Hastings Bill Ritcher, coder and CEO of Guiffy, is aware of ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/reviews-byname-guiffy_suremerge-20060706 Guiffy SureMerge SureMerge is a Java-based tool for both compare and merge operations. The tool is the primary focus of Guiffy Software. Austin Hastings wrote a review of the tool for the CM Crossroads web site. That review is available here, as well. http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/tools-byname-guiffy_suremerge Compare (diff) Tools diff is of course the archetype of this class of tools. There are various implementations of the Unix command line diff utility, but the GNU diffutils package is considered representative of all of these. The tools are: Beyond Compare diffutils Guiffy SureMerge http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/tools-compare CM Crossroads is pretty much the place to go for CM-related conversation. A few weeks ago they announced an 'upgrade' to the site: there would be a few days of down-time, and then things would be back to normal. In fact, the upgrade (and the site outage) lasted for 10 ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/cm-crossroads-upgrade A while back, I wrote a review of Guiffy SureMerge for CM Crossroads. I even wrote about the process, here. I'd like to think that I'm the guy for writing SCM tool reviews. I've been a vendor rep, so I know where a whole bunch of the bodies are buried. ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/how-do-i-review-a-scm-tool I was browsing some Spanish-language software development blogs, and came across a reference to MatchPoint, a mainframe-oriented product from a Swiss company called CM First AG. These guys don't seem to have any more idea than most about how to manage database changes, but their product (or at least, ... http://www.longacre-scm.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/matchpoint-a-first-pass-at-deployment-management