A day in the life of...

At work we use SourceSafe for our version control, and I used SourceAnyWhere as the client. I would like to outline the facts and let you decide what happened for yourself. 01: I checked out my model (EcoModeler) 02: I added a new class. 03: Generated code. 04: Checked in the mode. 05: Checked out. 06: Added two new associations 07: Generated code. 08: Checked in. 09: Checked out. 10: Added a parameter to a method. 11: Changes a state machine diagram. 12: Checked in. After each of the changes I would implement code in my application that used them, so if the changes were lost at any point during this process then I would notice because my app would no longer compile. Today I checked out the model and noticed that my new class was missing. I backed up my generated source code and then regenerated code from the model. Using BeyondCompare I checked for differences and came up with the list of changes in the steps above. Somehow the model in my source control had 3 revisions missing. I...

In an ECO app I am writing it is very important that updates by other users are identified as soon as possible. This is because there will be multiple users all selecting jobs to do from a predefined list, and it is not only possible but also very likely that more than one user will select the same job at the same time (the job at the top of the list). To implement this I chose to use the remote persistence feature of ECO and in particular its Sync Server feature. Every 5 seconds my client apps will contact the server and retrieve a list of updates made by other users, it will then apply those updates to the cache of its own EcoSpace. So when a user selects a job to do at the top of the list their app will stamp it as InProgress and update the DB, the job will then automatically disappear from the screens of all other users. As I like to use undo blocks in my app to allow the user to cancel changes (using my DirtyObjectCatcher component) it is highly likely that during these synchro...

There are exciting times ahead! The team that brought you ECO for Delphi are now a separate company named Capable Objects ( http://www.capableobjects.com ). ECO will still be part of the next release of Delphi, but according to the official statement ( http://dn.codegear.com/article/3673> ) and comments in the newsgroups it is quite obvious there will also be a version of ECO for Visual Studio! In the past the ECO guys released patches for ECO bugs, unfortunately it was not always possible to provide a patch. With the guys now being a separate company they are free to decide their own release schedules. Instead of having to wait for a Delphi update they can now release updates as often as they wish. Just like the good old BoldSoft days when we used to get an official update really quickly if ever a critical bug was found. Not only that, but it would also seem that they will be shipping source code too! But that's not all John! The guys at Capable Objects have asked me to wr...