Friday, November 6, 2009

LabVIEW source code control, Tortoise, and JKI

All programmers should know the advantages of source code control (SCC), so I'm not going to talk about that. What I do want to touch on is using SCC with LabVIEW.

I've used Tortoise SVN for close to three years now with LabVIEW. It works pretty well, although LV doesn't sync well with SVN. Several years ago I used Visual Source Safe, and I liked being able to check files in and out from within the LV development environment. So I was happy when I saw JKI say that they had a Tortoise tool. I installed it later that summer, but then LV2009 came out so I had to re-install it.

I don't use it anymore, for one simple reason. Everytime I try to check something in or out, this annoying popup appears:


I might as well just go to the explorer window to check in & out, which is what I've done for years now.

I can understand JKI wanting to make money for their work (although $99 seems steep). But that pop-up appears every single time... it has annoyed me so much that I'll never buy it. Too bad, because otherwise JKI seems to do great work.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

bro... i'm using the jki plug in with tortoise and subversion too and that pop up IS annoying. I just can't sympathize with ya... i look at it as the suffering a cheapskate must endure. but i am what i am :-)

what makes me stick with the windows explorer method is being able to commit more than one file at a time.

That's why i won't buy the jki. tool.

Unknown said...

I agree with the more than one file option. Also, some of the new options added to Tortoise make it even easier to use - I particularly like the more streamlined method for adding new files to an existing project.