While I still live in the hell of ClearCase and ClearQuest.
If there in contrast to my beliefs was a God and a Hell as the bible mention it, I am very sure that all developers who has ever worked on ClearCase / ClearQuest (without trying to sabotage it) is headed there, while all developers forced to work with it gets a free pass to heaven no matter what other sins they might have performed.
The Visual Studio integration of ClearCase / ClearQuest just plain simply sucks. Or that might imply that it actually works a little?, my recommendation for that is to NEVER install it!… A list if strikes towards it:
- It makes Visual Studio unstable as hell, you have to live with very frequent crashes.
- Adding files fails 50% of the time, they seems like they are added looking at the icons ect. but in fact they are not and you have to re-add them in the CC Explorer (Which only sucks a little less)
- ReSharper becomes… uhmm… I am not shure what to call ReSharper when it can’t refactor anymore.
And now you might think, isn’t this a bug in ReSharper?, well ReSharper works fine with all other Source Control Systems I know of, so for me it is easy to cast blame at IBM. - It does not integrate with the SCC model, one of the reasons given by IBM for this seems to be pure lack of knowledge on there side.
Reason: “We can’t do this under the SCC model”
Counter: “Why the hell can SVN, TFS and others do it under the SCC model then"?” - Requires explicit check-out, yes the automatic checkout it actually does provide, is sure to jump “randomly” around in the file, forgetting the change you made that resulted in the checkout or inserting that change a “random” place. (It might not be random, but it does sure seem so)
Oh and then there is ALL those features it just simply lack.
Don’t even get me started on those.
On the bright side
We have started to use Atlassian Confluence an “Enterprise Wiki” as they call it, and i must say, i DO NOT sway to java solutions often, but this wiki which is directly targeted at team/company collaboration, is the best ting I have seen to lift exactly that.
But be warned, i tried getting it to run on Apache Tomcat 6.0 first as a WAR file (or whatever, I’m not very into the Java application servers), but I never got that to work, my very first experience with a Java application server made me think “What's all the fuzz about Java being good at this stuff, this F**** shit doesn't work in any prober way”.
In the end I used the standalone deployment pre-packed with a Apache Tomcat 5.??, after some hassle I even got it up and running on a SQL Server 2005 Express.
The installation experience can be a REAL pain, and you may be close to giving up many times along the way, but I can only say DON’T!!! give up, it may not seem like it is worth it, but if I am to judge that, I would say that it totally is…
An yes, it does have bugs and such, but in contrast to the above mentioned product (ClearCase), the bugs is in the corners where you rarely go, and not in the dead center where you always work.
Even better, it is very affordable for small companies and teams as well, 10$ for a 10 user starter edition, that is just a brilliant idea if you ask me, plus if your a non-profit or Open Source project it is FREE!… (they do require some verification in this case though, and well that's both acceptable and understandable)
Now go INSTALL!… you will thank me. (well only if you need a collaborative tool)