Trouble using multi-user edit with VCS connected

[gk]

Hello Michael, Tim,

I've been trying build 1017 with Manual check-out. But this makes no difference when saving? Checking-in is fast enough though.

I hope you will find a solution to this, because in the current situation it is not fun to edit the Project...

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[gk]

Hello Tim, Michael,

is there any news on the performance issues when using VSS 6.

I have to re-install H&M because of change in machines. However, I can only download 5.3 from the website, and I don't want to use that, because it is not workable. (I have an older 5.2 installer (build 880?), so I'm thinking of using that).

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[Tim Green]

Hi Gerwin,

Are you getting better performance with Build 880? That is actually unlikely, so we'd like to hear about it if you are. At the moment the general recommendation is to use VSS 2005 or later for larger projects as the performance issues have only been reported from users with VSS 6.

[gk]

Hello Tim,

I'm talking about the latest build of 5.2. (not sure which one that is, is there anyway to download that?) In that version we had issues with H&M not getting all the latest versions of topics when starting up H&M or when using Refresh Project.

In 5.3 you solved this as far as I can see, but now refreshing the project and saving one topic is too slow to work with (because it is getting all topics, not just the changed ones).

Changing to a later VSS version is not that simple unfortunately.

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[Tim Green]

Hi Gerwin,

There are more changes in the pipeline to cater to VSS 6's slow performance. Basically what will happen is that only visible topics in the tree will be updated on a refresh, which appears to help quite a lot. This should bring significant improvement in projects that have chapters but won't make much difference if all your topics are top-level topics (which probably won't happen very often).

If you'd be interested in testing a beta with these changes I'd be happy to mail you a link as soon as it becomes available. (You can always install a second version of Help & Manual in a second folder without interfering with your main installation -- I usually have four or five different installations on my working machines.)

[gk]

Hello Tim,

any news on when the code from this beta will be in a 5.3 build?

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[Tim Green]

Hi Gerwin,

any news on when the code from this beta will be in a 5.3 build?

There are a couple of other things we are working on as well, but it looks as though it will be quite soon.

[gk]

Hello Tim,

we've been working with H&M 5.3 and VSS 6 for a few weeks now and apart from taking some time when saving etc. it really works well.

Thanks for your help and quick responses, very much appreciated! (I thought a compliment would be nice, instead of all the questions and complaints )

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[gk]

Hello Tim (and colleagues),

we are still experiencing some problems with the VCS and the Table of Contents.
One user edited the TOC, saved it and closed H&M.
I then opened the help project and did not see the changes.
I used "Refresh project" several times, when I read this in the help file:

User Refresh Project to avoid TOC conflicts:
To avoid conflicts you should always select Refresh Project in the Project tab before making any changes to the TOC. This will update your local copy of the TOC with the current main version.

But alas, it had no effect.
I had to do a "Get latest version" in VSS, which resulted in getting the table_of_contents.xml
After that, the changes were visible.

Any ideas of what I could do to also get the table_of_contents.xml when opening the project and/or using "Refresh project"?

Kind regards,
Gerwin

[Richard Shaw]

Hi,
I am also experiencing the issue with the ToC not being refreshed when "refresh project" is pressed. It is quite awkward and has required me manually reapply changes which have been lost when users have checked in updates which didn't include other users changes.

Richard

[Tim Green]

Hi Gerwin, Richard,

This thread is in the Help & Manual 5 forum: I just want to make sure that you are using Help & Manual 5. If that is the case, first please make sure that you are using the current version of HM 5,which you can check with Help > About. The current version of Help & Manual 5 is 5.6 Build 1360. You can download the latest installer from the link at the BOTTOM of this page (just install on top of your current version to update):

http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html

If you still have problems you will probably just have to continue to use the "Get latest version option". Visual SourceSafe is an obsolete version control system that is no longer available from Microsoft. If at all possible, I would recommend upgrading to Help & Manual 6 so that you can use SubVersion (SVN), which is now actively supported. SVN is radically better than VSS and will provide you much more flexibility, including the ability to work offline. You only need to connect to the SVN repository to synchronize your work and get the latest updates from the repository. You can do your actual work without a connection.

[Richard Shaw]

Tim,
I am using Help and Manual version 5.5.0 build 1273 at the moment.
Are there any plans to integrate with Team Foundation Server in the future as this would be our migration path from Visual Source Safe?

Regards,
Richard

[gk]

Hello Tim,

we are already using 5.6 Build 1360, so unfortunately updating to get rid of this annoying problem is not the solution.

Of course I would have to justify the investment for upgrading to H&M 6, so I'm testing it the upcoming weeks.
SVN is however not a real option though, since we are also moving towards TFS, and having different VCSs is not really what we would want.

Best regards,
Gerwin

[Tim Green]

We are already working on Team Foundation Server support but it has turned out to be much more complex than expected. Like Exchange Server, TFS is a highly complex product that has also been changing its interface and API significantly from version to version. Since TFS is generally used in corporate environments that stay with a single version for a long time and often can't upgrade even if they want to, that means that TFS support means support for not one but effectively several products, each of which on its own is orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with than SVN. Just configuring a usable TFS testing environment for the disparate versions took a couple of months, without any actual development work.

So TFS support is definitely in the works, but getting there is going to take a while. And we are not yet sure what "a while" is going to mean here ourselves...