Douglas,

I agree completely. I don't think, we made a wise decision while back, when we decided to not use Source Safe. We have this situation here: our main project called JobControl works with lots of applications, each of them is responsible for the specific task. For instance, during my work here (2 years +) I designed (or took in my ownership and then modified) 15 applications, not talking about lots of reports, UDFs, XForm transformations, etc. Usually each developer is responsible for the particular application.

Still the process of updating and maintaining is very painful and combersome.

My colleague is supposed to write a special migration utility...

>This sounds like there is not a very tight development budget. The methods you describe seem to me to be very man-hour intensive, and is something I doubt I could get away with. Visual sourceSafe is a little cumbersome, and of course there are developers that check out a module for revision or enhancement and forget to check it back in, and then someone else checks it out the next day and makes a change and then checks it back in. then when the original developer remembers and tries to check in all his work, finds that the module will not be accepted now because of the subsequent change. What this means is, of course, some discipline must be adhered to so that all the peices fit, and this is usually the responsibility of the project manager/supervisor, this in order to stay on time and to meet the delivery deadlines. In some operations, the bean counters must be kept happy.
>
>In cases where a single developer is working alone, then possibly a source control program is not required (Always do your backups) and the application will go as planned. Using a source control application always adds to the development costs as well.
>
>On the other hand, I would shudder to think that each developer on the team was mainaining duplicates of everything. This would be very difficult to manage IMHO, and to keep synchronized.
>
>>>
>>>Hi Bret,
>>>
>>>We use the same approach here and I'm not happy about it. First of all, since I'm not the person, who is responsible for our classes update, each change, which I think is necessary, I need to explain in lots of e-mails to finally have a rejected message or implemented it not the way I wanted.
>>
>>Yeah it is an approach that has some drawbacks and is not the best for all applications. But it has worked well here. We all work in quads (cubicles) so talking to each other is not problem. We have had long debates about things, but mostly it works well.
>>
>>>
>>>Another problem:
>>>
>>>We have a Developer server, a Live server + each developer has his/her own local copy of everything. The task of maintaining all these systems in sync seems too complicated. I finally mostly work on the Developer server itself, not on my local drive, since it has outdated applications anyway... Sometimes I forgot to make a backups, so it may lead to some serious problems. Fortunately enough, I always know, that I'm doing...
>>
>>Keeping things in Synq, backups, and all are very important indeed if this system is to work. But since we have only one major application (a few minor ones that are in house work) then it is not too hard to ensure all the above. But I feel my life and all the programmers will be getting a bit complicate here shortly as the money would like all VFP exe stuff to go to the web. In fact I am working on just that right now. An experiment taking a section of the App to the web (query only) using Cold Fusion and FoxWeb. I know it will be 3 steps forward and 2 steps back until I feel I get things into an easily maintenable system.