pifts.exe

March 10, 2009 · Posted in Thougths · Comment 

I just read about pifts.exe at a fellow Swedish blogger.

It does look a little suspicious, but I am not convinced it is a cover up.

All the threads I have seen mentioning pifts.exe at the Norton Forum site, before being deleted, has contained loads of junk.

I might be a social attack against Norton.

Windows Azure goes local

March 6, 2009 · Posted in Creating Software · Comment 

According to Computerworld the technology in Windows Azure will be part of Windows Server in the future. I really hope this will come with a service pack about the same time Azure is released for commercial use.

By keeping the entry level pricing low, or free, this is a perfect way to get students and start ups on the Microsoft train. It doesn’t come as a surprise since Microsoft makes its money from selling licenses, but it’s nice to get the information out.

No history to Subversion

March 2, 2009 · Posted in Creating Software · Comment 

I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where SourceSafe was kicked out.
In most cases there were long discussions on how to handle the history in SourceSafe.
Most developers seems to manage without migrating the history, but there has always been a vocal minority that desperately want to have the history migrated.

When dealing with this it has struck me that every project that was in favor of migrating the history also was missing decent release practices.
The loudest arguments are usually that they often need to check what changed between two old versions when bugs are triaged. There are usually two reasons for this. The first is that someone has to be blamed for the error. The other is that they don’t really know when the feature was released in the first place.

My recommendation usually is to set up a working release management structure before migrating the source code to a new repository. Especially if the SourceSafe repository hasn’t crashed yet.

As far as I know there is no tool that can recreate the SourceSafe history in Subversion or Team Foundation Server for all edge cases. Especially since the notion of sharing doesn’t exist in SVN or TFS.
If you know of a good tool to get the history out of a SourceSafe repository please let me know.