Subversion

First I want to thank everybody who has been reading my blog. Even though PainlessSVN has not been "officially" released, I did put it up for the public. I'm giving a discount for my blog readers. Please use "blogearlybirdaug2008", without the quotes to get $30 off the regular price. This will last until September 5, 2008, midnight Mountain Standard Time (UTC-7).

The official release is September 6th, 2008.

The reason I haven't been posting, is because I've been hard at work with PainlessSVN 1.2.0. I've been fixing the install script, so that I can add some new stuff. The only thing that I can say, is that this next version will come with Subversion server. You can choose not to install Subversion. If you do install it, the install script will configure it for you. The script will also do the following:

• Create the repository root directory
• Set svnserve.exe to run as a service
• Configure the PainlessSVN console to pick up the svnserve settings automatically

There's actually quite a bit more, but this all that I'm going to say for now.

I stumbled onto WANdisco's new Subversion community site:

It has some features similar to Facebook. I already signed up and lurk there regularly.

I've been working on making the repository UI more intuitive. I wanted the UI to make sense at first glance. I believe I got the Subversion Realms working in an intuitve way now.

Notice that all of the repositories with the same realm are now under the same realm node. The Subversion Red-Book explains that repositories in the same realm should point to the same password and authorization file. I'm reflecting that best practice here.

Also notice that the second repository has a custom post-commit hook. This repository is using the rss hook that is in the "Subversion C# hooks" download page.

I finally got reading the Subversion authz file working (at least the basic UI layout). This screenshot is done against one of my live Subversion servers:

So my next step is reading the actual path permission in code, then figuring out how to do an UI for that. The "kernel" that drives PainlessSVN is actually open sourced and it's called SVNManagerLib. I'm hosting it over at CodePlex. Writing this code is not that hard compared to all the UI tricks that I need to use to present this to users.

I've done a bit more work on the server dashboard. I'm concentrating on what I think I can release relatively soon, so I removed a few things that were not ready for 1.1.

Here is the dashboard when it can't find a Windows service for svnserve.exe:

This will be tweaked a bit more to indicate when a version of Subversion is too old to have native support for Windows services.

Here is the initial look when the dashboard finds that there is a running instance of the svnserver.exe Windows service:

Here is the same view, but with the panel expanded:

PainlessSVN will now be able to start or stop the Windows service, if it has enough security rights to interact with it. There are some instances where PainlessSVN won't be able to acquire a reference to the service, if the target machine is different from the one PainlessSVN is running on.

Here is a screenshot with the dashboard detecting that the service is installed, but not running:

Ok, the last UI was bad even it being just a test. The colors were just clashing badly, and it was mostly an eyesore.  I promise I won't inflict that on the world at large.

I did a lot of tweaks and tests, and came up with what I think is a winner. I still want to put more information on the screen, but I believe this will be the general layout from now on. Here are screenshots:

I'm following Vista UI as my guide. Less is definitely more in this case.

I been looking for how to present the information about the server in the server view. I kept going back to the UI for the Security Center in Windows XP. I couldn't find any controls out there that would mimic the controls in the Security Center. Again, I turned to my friend, Brandon Dobbie, and he created an expandable panel with functionality very similar to the ones in the Security Center.

This control has not been released yet. I'm doing private testing for him right now. He created this control in less than a day. It's still not ready for public consumption, but I'm very happy with the results so far.

Here's a screenshot with a Subversion server that has svnserve installed as a Windows Service:

Here's a screenshot with a Subversion server that does not have svnserve installed as a Windows Service:

This version of the server info view is a lot closer to the vision that I have for it. This is not the final form, but it is very close to it.

Brandon is building a couple more custom controls for me. These controls are mostly Vista and Windows 7 specific, but they should work with Windows XP.

I asked my good friend, Brandon Dobbie, if he could come up with something for a non-MMC PainlessSVN client. He did an excellent job, as always. He's a UI wizard, and if you need to fix your UI, he's the guy to talk to. Here's what he came up with:

I thought that I could use some of this for the server node view. After some pounding on the keyboard, I came up with something not quite as good as his, but good enough for the current MMC version of PainlessSVN. Here's a screenshot of a Subversion server that is installed as a windows service:

I'm still having some issue with images on Windows XP. The next screenshot is on Vista Ultimate 64-bit and Subversion server is not installed as a service:

I'm a very visual guy, and I really enjoy posting screenshots. This is one way to help me keep track of my progress. I know a lot of developers like to work in secrecy, but I'm not one of them. At least I don't think I work in total secrecy. Hope you are enjoying my journey through improving PainlessSVN as much as I am.