>Hi
>
>Helping a site that is interested in introducing source control for a set of VFP7 and VFP9 applications.
>
>I've used a variety of source control on other non Fox developments but wondered if anyone has strong recommendations for or warning on source control systems that could be applied.

Fifteen years ago (ouch, is it that long ago already?) I was on a team which used SoS (source off-site), which was, IIRC, a very good wrapper around SourceSafe. Then on another project I used Tortoise/SVN, which worked fine but had several glitches: it was case sensitive and VFP isn't - VFP may even change the case of a file when it saves (VFP7 back then). The Tortoise's so-called shell integration, i.e. it adding some four or five bars into your rightclick menu on every bloody file or folder everywhere on your machine was a PITA, and having no client but that rightclick (then the client appears!) meant that I had to navigate to the actual folder where I kept stuff... which led to many cases of confusion (I forget which subfolders are shared and which are my own).

For the last few years I'm with a team which uses Vault, and it works swimmingly. We aren't even using all of its features, but it has saved our butt dozens of times. The only downside is that it decides not to increase the version count on unchanged files, so there are many cases when the vcx and vct have different numbers - and then it's near impossible to diff them, because the same vcx matches two vcts (only code or properties changed, or it was just recompiled). Tried to automate the retrieval of vct's history based on the name and date of vcx, however the same vcx exists in several folders (branching out for every major version and now there may be forms.vcx in six places) and retrieving the history for just one of them proved illusive. Can't get there from here.

The repository is on a server, and nobody of the team is in the same city (mostly not in the same country) and it doesn't matter - the communication is always fast enough, even with my outdated connection here.

The one general rule for all these cases is not to even try to integrate with the project manager. The interface is obsolete, unfinished, the protocol even more so, and even at the times when it worked for some people, it never worked for most of us. The steps needed were even more complicated than coding for an ATS modem or ESC/P or HPL printers (did each, I know what I'm talking about). Instead of integration, just learn to live with some manual bookkeeping, i.e. know which pieces you touched and either get latest and check them out before you touch them, or make sure you can merge your changes if someone else was faster, or simply communicate with the others and see if anyone needs the same files at the same time. Don't expect the software to think instead of you (if you do, you get a Microsoft Google Facebook on your brain).