The roadmap to Ivercy 1.1

Well, this is not a real roadmap, as it lacks milestones and a detailed timeline. Still I like the word so much I use it anyway.

During the last weeks we received a lot of feedback from our customers through support requests. Additionally I got a lot of input from talking to customers and prospects at the AEK conference where I was speaking about source code control and Microsoft Access.

Planned features in Ivercy 1.1

Based on this input received, we put together a list of features to implement for the next version of Ivercy.

This list of new features is intentionally rather small. This frees up resources to improve the documentation and to provide timely bug fixes. – To our delight only two reproducible, real bugs have been reported in Ivercy 1.0 so far. These have been fixed with the recent release of version 1.0.4, which can be obtained from our download page.

Performance improvements

Especially with large projects, the integration of Ivercy into Access can be a bit of a performance drain.

As the communication between Ivercy and the source code control system is the responsibility of the MSSCCI-Provider it is beyond our control. So there are two aspects we are going to focus on.

• To reduce the number of queries to the SCC-System by managing status more intelligently and improving the internal process.

• To move the automatic status updates to a background thread to be less intrusive.

Extended source file processing

Access Forms and reports do contain large binary blocks for printer settings (e.g. PrtDevMode, PrtDevNames) and other Access-internal information you usually will not need during development. Access modifies this data automatically and often, which causes several problem, like…

• Modified/OutOfDate marks for irrelevant changes,

• cluttered diff visualizations that make it hard to spot the important changes,

• changes to files that would have been unchanged otherwise.

Similar to the existing “RemoveLines” feature, we will enable you to have Ivercy remove those blocks from source files automatically. This will result in smaller file sizes, less (irrelevant) changes and ultimately in a more unobtrusive integration of source code control into your workflow.

Exclude Data & Misc-Objects from source code control

The use of the Data and Misc-Objects binary file for tables and database properties is not ideal. We are aware of that for quite a while. Still it is a lot of effort to implement a better way to store this data.

You suggested a very simple yet elegant alternative. Just leave the Data and Misc objects out of source code control entirely.

That is an option we are planning to implement in the next release as well.

Minor features and improvements

There were some minor improvements suggested, we plan to implement as well.

• “Show History” command in the context menu

• Add a toggle or checkbox to the Ribbon to disable Ivercy temporarily if not needed

• Persist the option to show or hide the output window in the config file

Release date

We are not committing to a fixed release date yet. Our rough plan is to release Ivercy 1.1 in January 2016.

In the meantime we will be releasing preview/beta-releases and of course bug fixes, if necessary.

Not included

Integration into the VBA-IDE was our top priority to put into the next version before we released Ivercy 1.0. – Much to our surprise this was not requested as much as we expected. We listen to you. So this feature has been deferred to a later release to focus on things you consider to be more important.

Feedback welcome

If you want to share your thoughts on this roadmap or have got additional feature request, please write a comment on this blog post or send an email. We highly appreciate any feedback.