Furo's World

Visual Studio 2005 and ClearCase

ClearCase is one of the references when you deal about configuration management. It allows to manage a project’s life cycle, control changes on this project, proposes version and workspace management and of course, allows team development (multi-site).

ClearCase works with what it calls Vobs(Versioned Object Base) and Views. Basically, all the data, such as code files and documents, are stored into entities named Vobs. Those vobs are the repositories in which each developer will create their branch, manage and their project. To access those Vobs, they need to be mounted as a virtual file system through a dynamic view for example. So you can use your repository like any mounted drive on your OS! Of course, when you are editing or creating a file, you work on a private copy so there is no risk to erase project’s source whithout a commit.

Speaking of which, there is no notions of commit in CC, instead you use Check-out/Check-in commands. The first one is well known by CVS or SVN and the second acts as a commit. What about add or delete for example? They are managed by the view in your OS and validated by the Check-in! For example if you want to add a file, just copy paste it in you view!

Anyway, I’m not here to sell that product so let’s concentrate on development: ok it looks nice and different from other code management tool but how to use it with an IDE like Visual Studio 2005?

Well it is pretty simple

Visual Studio 2005 comes with a very useful tool which is “Source Control“. Visual Studio source control is simply an environment for third party source control plug-ins so to enjoy it you have to install the plug-in of your favorite tool.

In our case, ClearCase (mouahahah, case-case, ok I’m out…) plug-in can be found on IBM/Rationnal web site (here). Once this plug-in is installed, you have to activate it in Visual Studio options and source control will appear in the File menu.

It is nearly finished! First copy your project in your new ClearCase view and open the VS solution. Just go in “File/Source Control/Change Source Control” and bind your new project to the view.

And that’s it! Now you have the possibility to check-in/out, merge code, view history and everything you can do with ClearCase from VS. Of course, depending on your setup things will be different but I’ll detail it another time!

For now, the point is that with the Visual Studio Source control, you can manage easily your project configuration on ClearCase but also with other software of that kind (cvs, svn,…).