What VPME Developers Are Saying
About the ProMatrix Source control Kit!

The "ProMatrix Source Control Kit" should not only be considered Essential! But a "Critical" component of any Visual FoxPro developer's "Tool Kit". Products from ProMatrix Corporation have always been extremely 'High Quality' and with the release of the "Source Control Kit", the ProMatrix Corporation steps way out in front of the competition (again), and continues to show that their emphasis is on "Professional Tools" for "Professional Results!"

I have been using Visual Source Safe with VPM and VPME for four years now, and it has been a real nuisance to have to bring up the project manager, and check the check-out status of file, and check them in and out from the project manager prior to doing development for the object builder. This is now all integrated into the Object Builder so that it indicates when an object is being modified by another team member, and automatically opens the file check-out form of the source control provider when one starts to edit a file that has not been checked out.

The steps one had to go through to keep the project menu and object menu in sync was almost a joke. Since doing a project update might bring in a revised menu automatically, it was easy to get the project menu and the object builder menu out of sync. The only way to get them back into sync was to open the project manager, check-out the menu, open the menu with the menu builder force a change to the menu to get it to trigger the logic to rebuild the object builder menu, then exit from the menu builder, open the project manager again, and check the menu back in. All this was required just to get the menu back in sync if some other team member made a modification to the menu. Since you have no signal that the menu has changed, this operation had to be done every time the project was updated for any reason just to be sure the menu stayed in sync. This is now done automatically by SCK as the project is opened for the first time. In the none SCK version a none recoverable error was always produced if the menu builder was started and the menu had not previously been checked out of source control, which is also automatically taken care of in the SCK version.

With the integration of source control into the VPME development environment both single developer and development teams will see a number of benefits:

1. Having code under source control, you automatically have a detailed audit of every change made to every element of your project. Not only do you have the ability to compare the current version to any prior version, but also you have the ability to revert to a prior version if needed.
2. Having the ability to compare the module you are debugging with the previous version at any time is very helpful in quickly isolating the lines of code that have been changed, and often help you spot the problem much more quickly than going back through the code trying to find where you have applied changes that might be part of the problem.
3. The check-in check-out of modules as they are being modified helps keep the entire team informed as to who is working on each piece of the project, and helps prevent having two developers from making conflicting changes to the same module.
4. When time to create a new distribution nears, the list of currently checked out modules helps prepare an action item list to quickly determine the status of the project. Also when the deployment developer starts to assemble the distribution, the check-out status can be used to make sure everyone has completed checking in all active changes.
5. With the Update Project List and Get Latest Version commands, each developer can make sure their project has all the latest components automatically without manually copying files back and forth between each developers workstation.
6. As projects are completed and shipped, the Label and Branch capabilities of Visual Source Control can be used it mark the status of every component of the application at the time of that release, so that if necessary any component or the whole project can be reverted to that particular release. In the mean time development can continue on future enhancements and the correction of the occasional bug.
7. In addition to the specific implementation in the SCK, the user is free to extend the features using the project hook class, sappuob, and sappuobc which are called before and after most operations that involve accessing the source or testing the application.