Developer's Stash - 10 Things I do to code better

Elroy Dsilva — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:08:55 GMT

After being into the software development career for more than a year now, I feel I understand what is expected from a "Software Developer". There are a lot of things that need to be done, and they need to be done with care. Read More...

Developer's Stash - ClearCase and My uncontrolled Source

Elroy Dsilva — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:33:14 GMT

I had some really funny time working with the Rational ClearCase source control software yesterday.

I'm not a regular ClearCase guy. In fact, I hate source control softwares. They're always a pain until you realize it's power. I've been working on ClearCase for like, five months or something, but, I still don't feel comfortable with it, especially when it's installed with Visual Studio 2005.

Yesterday, I tried renaming a file from "abc.cpp" to "xyz.cpp". Some crap happened in there and BOOM!!, the file was gone. Nowhere to be seen neither in the Clearcase Explorer nor using Windows Explorer. My mouth was left open and my lungs deflated by the very thought of writing 1000 lines of code again. Where did the file go?? I don't know!

The only thing I could think about then was to search for it. But how? Not manually through each directory, of course. Pop! I opened up Windows Explorer Search(which was unbelievably slow, considering the fact the my files were stored on a "high-speed" processing server connected by a "high-speed" network). Was it an attack by some freaky terrorist trying to destroy my valuable work? Windows search disagreed to my thoughts. Results showed that there a file named "xyz.cpp.04ac136e421d4108b617d79bf2aec045" in a directory called "lost+found". Now, what does that mean? Was my file lost?? Probably, it was, which is in turn very very strange and no one likes such surprises.

Thanks anyways to ClearCase for preserving a copy of the file before it lost it and folks, remember, to take care of this when renaming files using Visual Studio which are managed by ClearCase. Did you have any such crazy experience? More ClearCase and Visual Studio fun coming up from a developer's stash.