The first blog in the new year, so first of all my best wishes for 2009! Let me use this fresh start to give you a summarised outlook on PureCM 2009-1, our next major release coming with some rather big changes. So now you might expect a huge list with all the main features, but allow me to make a small detour before getting there...

If you look at your file system, your data is organised in folders and files. Typically, the highest level folder separates your projects. This is also the approach used by most source control tools such as VSS, SVN or Perforce to structure data in their database. You make changes to a copy of your files or folders, and they get sent back to the database and stored as a new revision.

PureCM uses an additional high level object that includes the files and folders of a project: streams. Streams have two major advantages. First, they remember the relationship between each other, making merging (and merge tracking!) much more transparent. Second, they allow for so called “cheap” snapshots, i.e. branching without making file copies. This allows you to setup your configuration for parallel development, increasing productivity.

Depending on the complexity of your shop, you can create as many (or little) streams as you wish to separate projects, teams, development from maintenance etc... All projects –organised in streams – are stored in the PureCM repository database to keep it safe. You can find some examples later in this blog [anchor].

As a development manager, you need to have all information about your projects at hand. You want to know which changes have gone into a project, which bugfixes need to be merged, or where you are including a specific version of a shared library. So the first big change in PureCM 2009-1 is its repository-centric GUI. To structure the large amount of information present in a repository, the new task-specific views filter the information you need to speed up navigation.

As a developer, getting your own sandbox to work on a task in isolation is one of the main views you need, so this is what you get with PureCM 2009-1: the project files and folders, as well as your current changes and all submitted changes to the stream your current workspace is based on. You can thus organise your own changes into changesets, and track the submitted changes from your colleagues you need to integrate.

Note the navigation bar just below the menu bar, which gives you quick access to all the task-specific views. Say you are required to switch to an urgent bugfix and would like to get an overview of your workspaces in this repository, just click on “Workspaces” and select or create the appropriate one.

Likewise, go to the “Streams” view to browse the server, branch your project, and create a release or a stable baseline. You can find out more details about the advantages of the task-specific views in this blog.

Once you have finished a task and would like to move your workspace to the next project or baseline, another new feature in 2009-1 helps you to do this easily: Workspace Rebasing. This feature automatically populates your workspace with the content of any stream you select. No need to delete the existing workspace and create a new one anymore.

Talking of streams actually brings us back to the above discussion about the project structure of a PureCM repository. According to the complexity of your projects, your repository might resemble one of the following (stylised) examples:

In example A, the streams remain typically the same and changes get merged (or promoted) from development to QA to Production. Example B shows a mainline development example with release snapshots, while example C extends the former to a multi-product setup with shared libraries.

You can immediately see that you can use stream folders to organise your streams (or codelines). In this way, you can define permissions on the folder level that get inherited by the streams. This would allow you to define release streams as read only or editable, i.e. used as labels or maintenance branches. In other words, any stream will evolve in isolation or stay static after creation, depending on the stream (folder) policy.

With the new 2009-1 release, you will be able to define Merge Paths between any two streams to track and merge changes in real time. Say you know that you want to keep track of differences between “Feature A” and “Mainline”. Create a Merge Path and you will be able to see at any time, which changes are present in one stream but not in the other, just as in the screenshot below.

This information is also visible in the "Streams" view to highlight pending merges in your stream hierarchy. After merging, the changes get moved to the “Merged changesets” node to track them. Note that all that happens directly on the server, without the need to create a workspace for merging (but you could of course choose to do so as an option).

Using merge paths, you will even be able to define automatic merges! This basically means that any change submitted to the base stream gets instantly merged into the destination stream. In case of conflicts, PureCM automatically moves the change to “Pending Changesets” to allow you to resolve the conflict manually. Of course, one can still choose to make a one-off merge directly on the changeset without defining a merge path.

The essence of the PureCM 2009-1 release is its focus on making work with multiple projects easier. It will not just be easier to work with parallel configurations using Merge Paths and Workspace Rebasing, but also to get the relevant information with the new task-specific views. But before I forget: PureCM obviously gives you more than just that, including advantages like:-

• Eclipse and Visual Studio integration
• Proxy Server for distributed teams
• CruiseControl.NET and FinalBuilder integration
• Shared libraries between projects (called “Components” in PureCM)
• Integrated issue management
• .NET/Java APIs

We will shortly publish the PureCM 2009-1 beta2, which I will certainly announce in this blog. I look forward to getting your feedback once you have been able to play around with it!