Increased Developer Productivity With Source File Management

By Dimitris Poulos

The newest release of WebFOCUS Developer Studio has the benefit of various enhancements and new features aimed at improving application development and maintenance life cycle.

One such feature is support for source-code control, which enables you to track changes to source-code files during software development. Our source-code control feature provides project software management and file-version control for individual or team-based project development. The feature supports the industry standard source-code control API, a specification written by Microsoft.

Launching WebFOCUS 5 Developer Studio automatically enables this plug-and-play feature. That is, as long as your PC has a file management client software package that we support. So far Information Builders has tested only Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe, which according to Microsoft, works "with any type of file produced by any development language, authoring tool, or application."

Source-code control is integrated into the Projects development area of Developer Studio, and you may use it to manage all project resources.

If you have installed the client software for a supported file management product, you will notice that new options are enabled in Developer Studio.

You will notice we have created a new menu item called Source Control, and there is also a new icon in the toolbar of the explorer tree. In addition, a new column appears while viewing files available for a given project where the source-control status for every file will be displayed (i.e., controlled, not controlled, checked out).

You also will notice that if you right-click on an object, new options will be available in order to make source-control operations. These operations include the options to add and remove files from Source Control, check files in or out, retrieve a specific version of the file, and even run difference reports that show the history of changes across different versions of the file and lines of code that have changed.

As revisions are made and new files are added, the source-code control feature gives developers an easy way to manage and protect their applications via the point-and-click integration now available in Developer Studio.

This new feature is extremely easy to use, assuming the developer is familiar with a file management software and its operations. For more detailed information on source-code control, please refer to documentation included with the product. You will find information specific to source-code control on pages 3-26 in Developer Studio subfolder of the Developing Applications manual.