.NET Buzz Forum - Moving life into CVS and DocumentLocator and the Authoritative Source

You know I picked up a TabletPC recently. I will probably attend the North Africa Developer Conference in Morocco this year and I wanted to bring my TabletPC rather than my Corporate Laptop. It's a lot lighter (6 lbs vs. 11 lbs) and the batteries last forever (at least 6 hours versus barely 2). It is a 1.5 GHz box, while my Corporate Evo N800w is a 2 Ghz. We'll see if that really makes a difference.

Anyway, I sat down and prepared to move all my presentations and demos and C:/Utils over to the laptop. It's about 2 gigs of Powerpoints, demos, code, and goodness. If you've seen one of my presentations when I'm particularly hopped up on Diet Coke, you know I use most of it! :) So, I made a C:\demos folder and started a copy.

Then, I stopped. What the heck am I doing? If I copy this stuff straight, I'll have demos/presentations/code on three machines (my desktop as well). Every once in a while I make an important change to a PowerPoint, or find a major bug in some demo.

So, I said, it's time to move some of my life into An Authoritative Source (ne: Source Control). Less for the version control and more to define and authoritative source for information that I can pull from.

I have used Source Safe since before it was owned by Microsoft (Remember One Tree Software) and I've used various *nix source control systems. But, I hate it. Between Data Corruption and the general malaise I feel when I use it, it wasn't an option for my personal data. Not to mention the whole "make writable" nonsense. I'd prefer my personal files be writable be default, thank you very much.

Cons: CVS is too complicated for my wife to use and offers many advanced features like tagging and branching that are very "Source Code specific" IMHO. For that, it's perfect for my code. It does mean storing all your code in a "sandbox" that is a copy of what's on the repository. It's non-trivial for the novice to setup things like Check-In notifications and it doesn't support any kind of full text indexing. It doesn't automatically add files to the repository when you save them to a folder.

2. Document Locator

If you haven't tried DocumentLocator yet, do. If you aren't ready to download a trial, checkout their awesome Flash demos. This just might be the product for me. It also stores data in SQL Server, but it's not trying to be a Source Control System (even though it is that, and lots more).

Pros: It includes a namespace extension for Explorer that makes your document repository show up next to My Computer. You can open and save files from any Windows app directly into the Repository. I have started using it for all my "My Documents" type files. It supports versioning, has hooks into SCC (the Source Control APIs for Visual Studio) and most importantly it's EASY. It also replaces dtSearch with Full-Text Indexing of all files, including scanned/OCRed TIFFs and PDFs. I've long wanted to start scanning more documents and bills into my system, but I don't want to just dump a bunch of JPEG files into a folder. DocumentLocator has some sweet scanning integration and scans, OCRs and imports your documents into the repository. It supports a totally extensible schema and arbitrary tags that are also searchable. It also supports notifying people of changes and additions and will also suck documents directly out of Outlook and into the repository if the document meets a specific filter.

Cons: Backing up a single file while it's still inside the repository is still a challege, but I just back the whole SQL Server up anyway. And if you don't have SQL Server, just use MSDE and you can still store up to 2 gigs of files.

Both CVS and DocumentLocator act as an authoritative source for my data. I run the services side-by-side on my home server and pull from them as I please. I've got all my source CVS'ed and running on my TabletPC now, and I'll my documents and presentations full-text-searchable in Document Locator. Whew. That's a good weekend's work. Now it's time to watch Bernie Mac.


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