We have had an encouraging amount of feedback for the public betas we published for our last 2009-1 release. So of course we’re going to do it again for the upcoming 2009-2 release!You might have already read about some of the enhancements that you will get with PureCM 2009-2; if not, here are the bigger chunks:

• Enhanced Visual Studio 2005/2008 integration
• New Windows Explorer plugin
• Bulk merge and rollbacks directly on the server

With this current beta, you will now be able to test the first two enhancements yourself. Both the enhanced VS integration and the Explorer plugin are included in the PureCM client installer to keep installation as easy as possible. If you want to select them individually, simply choose the “Standard” installation.

>> Download the PureCM 2009-2 beta [link removed]

What can I expect from these enhancements?

Tim has covered the new Visual Studio features with his blog in detail, but we’re really quite excited about it so here they are again:

• No binding of solutions needed. This makes it much easier to add a new solution to PureCM or to get a source controlled solution from PureCM.
• Embedded PureCM views. You can now display both the “Workspace explorer view” and the “Workspace changeset view” known from the PureCM GUI to manage your changes; plus you will get a PureCM toolbar to easily access the most common operations.
• Perform advanced workspace operations. Embedding the workspace explorer view allows you to access operations such as rebase, workspace merge (merging changes from other streams into your workspace), shelve and unshelve etc. etc. – just have a go with the “All tasks” operations from the context menu  ;-)
• Organise checkouts using changesets. Create one or more changesets to group your ongoing changes/checkouts directly in Visual Studio.

True, not everybody is working with Visual Studio, and we have had quite a number of requests for a basic integration into Windows Explorer. This plugin is particularly useful when working with many different tools, but without having the need to access advanced GUI features. This is what you get with this beta:

• Get files from PureCM (i.e. creating a workspace)
• Add files to a folder/workspace under version control
• Checkout files and Submit changes
• “Check consistency” to automatically detect changes when editing files without checkout
• Support for namespace changes
• Access file history
• Visualisation  to show file differences and resolve conflicts (should they occur)

There are some features excluded from this beta which will definitely make it into the final release:

• Add folders and files to version control as a new project/stream
• Status icons for files under source control

So much for theory. To get a hands-on experience, download the beta installers, run them... and let us know what you think. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

>> Get the PureCM 2009-2 beta [link removed]

To send us your feedback, simply comment this blog or send an email to support@purecm.com. Have fun!