After quite a long time we released a new beta version of Ivercy this week.
This is the first beta for the upcoming new 1.1 release. From now on we will not work on new features until the release of version 1.1. Instead we focus on fixing bugs now. And there is still is some work to do in that regard. In other words: We are feature complete for the next release.
What was planned
Today I would like to compare the features we planned back in October to what is actually in the current beta.
Back then, we declared three major objectives.
- Improve Performance
- Optimize status management and reduce the number of queries to the SCC backend.
- Move automatic status updates to a non-blocking background thread.
- Reduce the number of “false positive” change detections.
- Optionally exclude Data&Misc-Objects from source code control.
So let’s look at these one by one, and see what we’ve got.
What we’ve got
I’ll look at the sub items of primary objective first.
Optimize status management and reduce the number of queries to the SCC backend
We improved our internal state management, use Access’ Date Modified property (unfortunately it’s not reliable), cache our checksum calculation and remove every query to the SCC-Backend that was not absolutely necessary. - This all significantly improved performance of Refresh Status and most notable Get Latest.
Move automatic status updates to a non-blocking background thread
Oh boy. This played a major part in wrecking our original schedule. In theory implementing multithreading based on the .Net Framework should not be too difficult. - Reality was quite different.
Multithreading in a COM-Add-In is somewhat different than in normal .Net-WinForms-Applications. You’ll need to manage some of the COM references yourself, otherwise the host (Access) might crash on shutdown. Thread synchronization with the UI-Thread does not work reliably in the way you would expect. – And even thought we tried to work around that, I suspect there still is a problem in version 1.0.15 with that, as I observed some weird application freeze situations since its release.
An even more serious issue exists however with Microsoft’s TFS-MSSCCI-Provider. It reacts quite hostile, by un-initializing itself, if ever invoked by more than one thread from the same process. I don’t think we can solve this problem without some fundamental changes to Ivercy’s design.
As any further work on this would have delayed the new version even more, I decided to disable any multithreaded use of the SCC-Backend. For now we only do the local preparation work for Status Update in the background. That slightly improves the situation, by reducing the time the Access UI is blocked.
So back to the top objective…
Improve Performance
We certainly achieved a lot in that regard. Considering execution time, there is not much left we could have improved further. Still the intrusive, blocking automatic status updates remain. – For now. But the improvements we have got already are so useful, I did not want to withhold them from you any longer.
Reduce the number of “false positive” change detections
Those false positive change detections result from modifications Access makes to the sources automatically. So we added two new features to deal with those. The first one are the SourceProcessingSettings, which allow you to configure lines and blocks of code to remove from the source files and thus ignoring any automatic changes to them.
Second we made it possible to ignore case of the text in the source files. You can configure that with the IgnoreCaseModifications option.
By using these two new options, you can reduce false positives to almost none (see the article above for the limitations). So I think we fully delivered on this objective.
So remaining is the third objective.
Optionally exclude Data&Misc-Objects from source code control
So the answer to this is simple. It’s not implemented at all. We total dropped that from our list for now. In last months we received lots of support emails and feature requests about the first and second objective, but none about this one. So the decision was easy to defer this item to a later release. This makes the other two available sooner, as they provide value to more of our customers; to you.
Check out the beta
Ok that’s it for now. If you are curious check out the most recent beta from the download page (scroll down, the betas are below the regular releases). Version 1.0.15 seems to have an issue with freezing Access on occasion though. I will send out a newsletter as soon as we’ve got a more stable release.