The post Agile Software Development appeared first on scmGalaxy.

Guide to Understading SSL Certificates

The post A Guide to Understanding SSL Certificates appeared first on scmGalaxy.

http://www.joomlaaa.com/Joomla-Articles/optimization/How-can-I-make-my-Joomla-site-load-faster.html

http://www.joomlaperformance.com

http://www.websiteoptimization.com

http://www.pathos-seo.com/joomla-technical-optimization/making-a-faster-joomla-website.html

http://www.pathos-seo.com/joomla-technical-optimization/making-a-faster-joomla-website.html

http://www.wzcreativetechnology.com/joomla-tips-and-tricks/74-how-to-make-joomla-site-load-fast.html

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/cache/7350

http://www.open-source-depot.com/archives/13-MySQL-Performance-Tip-on-CentOS4-on-GoDaddy.html

http://www.open-source-depot.com/archives/13-MySQL-Performance-Tip-on-CentOS4-on-GoDaddy.html

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/enable-the-query-cache-in-mysql-to-improve-performance.html

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=433&t=344013l

http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_optimize_a_MySQL_database_using_phpMyAdmin.html

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/mysql-optimize-table-cli/

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1250059

http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_optimize_a_MySQL_database.html

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

http://www.mightyjoomla.com/Joomla-Tips-Tricks/enable-and-use-gzip-compression-in-joomla-cms-to-enhance-website-performance.html

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=50278

www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=50278

http://www.phpmagicbook.com/htaccess-essential-tricks-for-blog-website-performance-a-guide/

http://www.dquinn.net/htaccess-adding-etags-gzip-expires-headers/

The post Joomla Website Performance appeared first on scmGalaxy.

excl.gif No Active Links, Read the Rules – Edit by Ninja excl.gif

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web (see www.pcmag.com/searchengines

But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google’s index, it’s still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let’s look at some of Google’s lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.pcmag.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query “Answer to life the universe and everything.”

Let Google help you figure out whether you’ve got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try “thre blund mise”) and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn’t always succeed; it works best when the word you’re searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you’re searching for “three blind mice,” underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for “three blind mice.”) You’ll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don’t have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you’ll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you’d rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you’d rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).

www.BangaloreOrbit.com

Oline Portal for Bangalore and Karnataka People                                                               n

Tourist Destination | Pilgrims Destination | News | Forum | Games | Jobs | Groups |

Taste of Kannada | Bangalore Darshan | Latest Event |

The post 20 Great Google Secrets appeared first on scmGalaxy.

Splunk (the product) captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
Splunk aims to make machine data accessible across an organization and identifies data patterns, provides metrics, diagnoses problems and provides intelligence for business operation. Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and web analytics.Splunk has over 7,900 customers worldwide.

Graylog2 + Elasticsearch + MongoDB

based on elastic search and Open Source. Graylog2 has powerful real-time text-based search, basic analytics, dashboards, and flexible alerts. Graylog2 is under heavy development. Graylog2 is Java. Both are no real equivalent to SPLUNK, SPLUNK is multiple years ahead, but it’s possible that these tools are also meet your requirement. Graylog2 is an open source log management system. It’s built with Ruby on Rails and MongoDB and uses its own JSON-based log format called GELF (Graylog Extended Log Format).

Apache Flume + Elastic Search + Apache Lucene
Cloudera CTO Jeff Hammerbacher suggests using Apache Flume, an open source log aggregation tool, and Elastic Search, an open source search system based on Apache Lucene, to create an open source log file search system

Fluentd + Elasticsearch + Kibana

Elasticsearch is an open source search engine known for its ease of use.
Kibana is an open source Web UI that makes Elasticsearch user friendly for marketers, engineers and data scientists alike.
Fluentd is an open source data collector, which lets you unify the data collection and consumption for a better use and understanding of data.
By combining these three tools (Fluentd + Elasticsearch + Kibana) we get a scalable, flexible, easy to use log search engine with a great Web UI that provides an open-source Splunk alternative, all for free.

Logstash + Elasticsearch + Kibana

logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.setting it up is way more complicated than setting up Splunk, but it offers similar – but not as complete – feature set. Elasticsearch is an open source search engine known for its ease of use. Kibana setting it up is way more complicated than setting up Splunk, but it offers similar – but not as complete – feature set.

Elasticsearch <=> Indexer
Logstash <=> Heavy Forwarder
Kibana <=> Search Head

OpenTSDB
OpenTSDB is an open source database sponsored by StumbleUpon. It’s designed for aggregating and visualizing machine data. It’s built on top of Apache Hbase and boasts the ability to “collect many thousands of metrics from thousands of hosts and applications, at a high rate (every few seconds).”

Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic is a cloud-based log management and analytics service that leverages machine-generated big data to deliver real-time IT insights

Reference – 
http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/16/free-equivalent-for-splunk-log-manager
http://docs.fluentd.org/articles/free-alternative-to-splunk-by-fluentd
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2610524/log-analysis/splunk-feels-the-heat-from-stronger–cheaper-open-source-rivals.html

http://kmlbblog.co.in/entries/general/splunk-vs-elk-elasticsearch-logstash-kibana–

The post Log Management Tools using splunk and other alternatives appeared first on scmGalaxy.

HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the SSL/TLS protocol to provide encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems.

Secure socket layer (SSL): how it works

1.   An SSL certificate enables encryption of sensitive information during online transactions.

2.   Each SSL certificate is a unique credential identifying the certificate owner.

3.   A certificate Authority authenticates the identity of a certificate owner before it is issued.
What is SSL and Certificate

The Secure Socket Layer protocol was created by Netscape to ensure secure transactions between web servers and browsers. The protocol uses a third party, a Certificate Authority (CA), to identify one end or both end of the transactions. This is in short how it works.

• A browser requests a secure page (usually https://).
• The web server sends its public key with its certificate.
• The browser checks that the certificate was issued by a trusted party (usually a trusted root CA), that the certificate is still valid and that the certificate is related to the site contacted.
• The browser then uses the public key, to encrypt a random symmetric encryption key and sends it to the server with the encrypted URL required as well as other encrypted http data.
• The web server decrypts the symmetric encryption key using its private key and uses the symmetric key to decrypt the URL and http data.
• The web server sends back the requested html document and http data encrypted with the symmetric key.
• The browser decrypts the http data and html document using the symmetric key and displays the information.

• A browser attempts to connect to a Web site secured with SSL.

keytool -genkey -alias bf-sandbox -keyalg RSA -keystore buildForgeKeyStore.p12 -keysize 2048

[root@ tmp]# keytool -genkey -alias bf-sandbox -keyalg RSA -keystore buildForgeKeyStore.p12 -keysize 2048
Enter key store password: XXXX
Enter key password for : XXX

You are about to enter information that will be incorporated into
your certificate request.  This information is what is called a
Distinguished Name or DN.  There are quite a few fields but you
can use supplied default values, displayed between brackets, by just
hitting , or blank the field by entering the character
before hitting .

keytool -certreq -sigalg RSA -alias bf-sandbox -file bf-sandbox.csr -keystore buildForgeKeyStore.p1Insallation Certificates in BuildForge

Point 1: You would need to update the bfclient.conf to make Build Forge aware of the certifications. As long as the certificates are in the correct it will work with Build Forge.

Point 2: The easiest way to update the cert would be change the new cert name to the name of the previous cerr. Then update the passwords.

Point 3:
Please use the following command to validate the keystore:

keytool -list -storetype pkcs12 -keystore fullyQualifiedNameOfFile.p12 -v

The Symmetric key

Well, Private Key/Public Key encryption algorithms are great, but they are not usually practical. It is asymmetric because you need the other key pair to decrypt. You can’t use the same key to encrypt and decrypt. An algorithm using the same key to decrypt and encrypt is deemed to have a symmetric key. A symmetric algorithm is much faster in doing its job than an asymmetric algorithm. But a symmetric key is potentially highly insecure. If the enemy gets hold of the key then you have no more secret information. You must therefore transmit the key to the other party without the enemy getting its hands on it. As you know, nothing is secure on the Internet. The solution is to encapsulate the symmetric key inside a message encrypted with an asymmetric algorithm. You have never transmitted your private key to anybody, then the message encrypted with the public key is secure (relatively secure, nothing is certain except death and taxes). The symmetric key is also chosen randomly, so that if the symmetric secret key is discovered then the next transaction will be totally different.

Encryption algorithm:

There are several encryption algorithms available, using symmetric or asymmetric methods, with keys of various lengths. Usually, algorithms cannot be patented, if Henri Poincare had patented his algorithms, then he would have been able to sue Albert Einstein… So algorithms cannot be patented except mainly in USA. OpenSSL is developed in a country where algorithms cannot be patented and where encryption technology is not reserved to state agencies like military and secret services. During the negotiation between browser and web server, the applications will indicate to each other a list of algorithms that can be understood ranked by order of preference. The common preferred algorithm is then chosen. OpenSSL can be compiled with or without certain algorithms, so that it can be used in many countries where restrictions apply.

The Hash:

A hash is a number given by a hash function from a message. This is a one way function, it means that it is impossible to get the original message knowing the hash. However the hash will drastically change even for the slightest modification in the message. It is therefore extremely difficult to modify a message while keeping its original hash. It is also called a message digest. Hash functions are used in password mechanisms, in certifying that applications are original (MD5 sum), and in general in ensuring that any message has not been tampered with. It seems that the Internet Enginering Task Force (IETF) prefers SHA1 over MD5 for a number of technical reasons (Cf RFC2459 7.1.2 and 7.1.3).

Signing:

Signing a message, means authentifying that you have yourself assured the authenticity of the message (most of the time it means you are the author, but not neccesarily). The message can be a text message, or someone else’s certificate. To sign a message, you create its hash, and then encrypt the hash with your private key, you then add the encrypted hash and your signed certificate with the message. The recipient will recreate the message hash, decrypts the encrypted hash using your well known public key stored in your signed certificate, check that both hash are equals and finally check the certificate.
The other advantage of signing your messages is that you transmit your public key and certificate automatically to all your recipients.
There are usually 2 ways to sign, encapsulating the text message inside the signature (with delimiters), or encoding the message altogether with the signature. This later form is a very simple encryption form as any software can decrypt it if it can read the embedded public key. The advantage of the first form is that the message is human readable allowing any non complaint client to pass the message as is for the user to read, while the second form does not even allow to read part of the message if it has been tampered with.

PassPhrase:

“A passprase is like a password except it is longer”. In the early days passwords on Unix system were limited to 8 characters, so the term passphrase for longer passwords. Longer is the password harder it is to guess. Nowadays Unix systems use MD5 hashes which have no limitation in length of the password.

Public Key Infrastructure

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the software management system and database system that allows to sign certifcate, keep a list of revoked certificates, distribute public key,… You can usually access it via a website and/or ldap server. There will be also some people checking that you are who you are… For securing individual applications, you can use any well known commercial PKI as their root CA certificate is most likely to be inside your browser/application. The problem is for securing e-mail, either you get a generic type certificate for your e-mail or you must pay about USD100 a year per certificate/e-mail address. There is also no way to find someone’s public key if you have never received a prior e-mail with his certificate (including his public key).

The post Know about Certificates and SSLs appeared first on scmGalaxy.

npm install (with no args in a package dir)
npm install <tarball file>
npm install <tarball url>
npm install <folder>
npm install <name> [–save|–save-dev|–save-optional]
npm install <name>@<tag>
npm install <name>@<version>
npm install <name>@<version range>
npm i (with any of the previous argument usage)

This command installs a package, and any packages that it depends on. If the package has a shrinkwrap file, the installation of dependencies will be driven by that. See npm-shrinkwrap(1).

A package is:

a) a folder containing a program described by a package.json file
b) a gzipped tarball containing (a)
c) a url that resolves to (b)
d) a <name>@<version> that is published on the registry with (c)
e) a <name>@<tag> that points to (d)
f) a <name> that has a “latest” tag satisfying (e)
g) a <git remote url> that resolves to (b)

Even if you never publish your package, you can still get a lot of benefits of using npm if you just want to write a node program (a), and perhaps if you also want to be able to easily install it elsewhere after packing it up into a tarball (b).

More info …

https://npmjs.org/doc/install.html

The post npm – Node Packaged Modules appeared first on scmGalaxy.

goal

The goal of this project is to help JavaScript developers write complex programs without worrying about typos and language gotchas.

Any code base eventually becomes huge at some point, and simple mistakes—that would not show themselves when written—can become show stoppers and waste hours of debugging. And this is when static code analysis tools come into play and help developers to spot such problems. JSHint scans a program written in JavaScript and reports about commonly made mistakes and potential bugs. The potential problem could be a syntax error, a bug due to implicit type conversion, a leaking variable or something else.

Only 15% of all programs linted on this website pass the JSHint checks. In all other cases, JSHint finds some red flags that could’ve been bugs or potential problems.

Please note, that while static code analysis tools can spot many different kind of mistakes, it can’t detect if your program is correct, fast or has memory leaks. You should always combine tools like JSHint with unit and functional tests as well as with code reviews.

How to install and verify version:

npm install jshint

which jshint
/usr/local/bin/jshint

/usr/local/bin/jshint -version
jshint v2.3.0

The post JSHINT appeared first on scmGalaxy.

Node.js untangles concurrency by replacing the Java platform’s standard, multithreaded approach with single-threaded, event-driven I/O.

Node.js (Node) is an I/O environment built on top of Google Chrome’s JavaScript runtime — essentially, a server-side implementation of JavaScript. Node’s asynchronous, event-driven I/O model makes it easy for developers with JavaScript knowledge to build high-performing, scalable, and highly concurrent web applications rapidly and run them in the cloud.

The post Know about nodejs? appeared first on scmGalaxy.

-cp <class search path of directories and zip/jar files>
-classpath <class search path of directories and zip/jar files>
A ; separated list of directories, JAR archives,
and ZIP archives to search for class files.
-D<name>=<value>
set a system property
-verbose[:class|gc|jni]
enable verbose output
-version      print product version and exit
-version:<value>
require the specified version to run
-showversion  print product version and continue
-jre-restrict-search | -jre-no-restrict-search
include/exclude user private JREs in the version search
-? -help      print this help message
-X            print help on non-standard options
-ea[:<packagename>…|:<classname>]
-enableassertions[:<packagename>…|:<classname>]
enable assertions
-da[:<packagename>…|:<classname>]
-disableassertions[:<packagename>…|:<classname>]
disable assertions
-esa | -enablesystemassertions
enable system assertions
-dsa | -disablesystemassertions
disable system assertions
-agentlib:<libname>[=<options>]
load native agent library <libname>, e.g. -agentlib:hprof
see also, -agentlib:jdwp=help and -agentlib:hprof=help
-agentpath:<pathname>[=<options>]
load native agent library by full pathname
-javaagent:<jarpath>[=<options>]
load Java programming language agent, see java.lang.instrument
-splash:<imagepath>
show splash screen with specified image

The post Java Command Line Options appeared first on scmGalaxy.

The other main standard that controls how the World Wide Web works is HTML, which covers how Web pages are formatted and displayed.

HTTP is called a stateless protocol because each command is executed independently, without any knowledge of the commands that came before it.

The post What is HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) appeared first on scmGalaxy.

The post Berkeley Internet Name Domain(BIND) appeared first on scmGalaxy.

The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn’t know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.

The post What is DNS (Domain Name System) appeared first on scmGalaxy.

Developed by SSH Communications Security Ltd., Secure Shell is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote  machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication  and secure communications over insecure channels. It is a replacement for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and rdist.

SSH protects a network from attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing. An attacker who has managed to take over a network
can only force ssh to disconnect. He or she cannot play back the traffic or hijack the connection when encryption is enabled.

When using ssh’s slogin (instead of rlogin) the entire login session, including transmission of password, is encrypted; therefore it is almost impossible for an outsider to collect passwords.

The post What is SSH(Secure Shell) appeared first on scmGalaxy.

Agile development practices increase the velocity at which software teams deliver customer value by improving everyone’s visibility into project features, quality and status.

BROAD DEFINITION: 
Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.

General Definition
There are many specific agile development methods. Most promote development, teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project.

Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning, and do not directly involve long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames that typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration involves a team working through a full software development cycle including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing.

Specification

This helps minimize overall risk, and lets the project adapt to changes quickly. Stakeholders produce documentation as required. An iteration may not add enough functionality to warrant a market release, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration.[1] Multiple iterations may be required to release a product or new features.

Team composition in an agile project is usually cross-functional and self-organizing without consideration for any existing corporate hierarchy or the corporate roles of team members. Team members normally take responsibility for tasks that deliver the functionality an iteration requires. They decide individually how to meet an iteration’s requirements.

Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents when the team is all in the same location. When a team works in different locations, they maintain daily contact through videoconferencing, voice, e-mail, etc.

Most agile teams work in a single open office (called bullpen), which facilitates such communication. Team size is typically small (5-9 people) to help make team communication and team collaboration easier. Larger development efforts may be delivered by multiple teams working toward a common goal or different parts of an effort. This may also require a coordination of priorities across teams.

No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team will contain a customer representative. This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer mid-iteration problem-domain questions. At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals.

Most agile implementations use a routine and formal daily face-to-face communication among team members. This specifically includes the customer representative and any interested stakeholders as observers. In a brief session, team members report to each other what they did yesterday, what they intend to do today, and what their roadblocks are. This standing face-to-face communication prevents problems from being hidden.

Specific tools and techniques such as continuous integration, automated or xUnit test, pair programming, test driven development, design patterns, domain-driven design, code refactoring and other techniques are often used to improve quality and enhance project agility.

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto are:

* Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
* Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
* Working software is the principal measure of progress
* Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
* Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
* Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
* Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
* Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
* Simplicity
* Self-organizing teams
* Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

The post Agile Software Development Methodology appeared first on scmGalaxy.

• Identification: an identification scheme reflects the structure of the product, identifies components and their types, making them unique and accessible in some form.
• Control: controlling the release of a product and changes to it throughout the lifecycle by having controls in place that ensure consistent software via the creation of a baseline product.
• Status Accounting: recording and reporting the status of components and change requests, and gathering vital statistics about components in the product.
• Audit and review: validating the completeness of a product and maintaining consistency among the components by ensuring that the product is a welldefined collection of components.

The definition includes terminology such as configuration item, baseline, release and version. When analyzing CM systems—automated tools that provide CM—it becomes evident that these incorporate functionality of varying degrees to support the above definition. Some CM systems provide functionality that goes beyond the above definition though. This is due (among other reasons) to the recognition of different user roles, disparate operating environments such as heterogeneous platforms, and programming-in-the-large support such as enabling teams of software programmers to work on large projects synergistically. To capture this extra functionality, it is necessary to broaden the definition of CM to include:

• Manufacture: managing the construction and building of the product in an effective and optimal manner.
• Process management: ensuring the carrying out of the organization’s procedures, policies and lifecycle model.
• Team work: controlling the work and interactions between multiple users on a product.

In summary, the capabilities provided by existing CM systems encompass identification, control, status accounting, audit and review, manufacture, process management and team work.

The post Definition of Configuration Management appeared first on scmGalaxy.

• Workspace creation
• Workspace synchronization
• File checkout
• Overlapping checkout by multiple users of the same file
• Atomic change-set check-in
• File diffs
• Automated merge
• Code-line branching
• File-set labeling
• User management and security

What really sets TFSC apart from the competition is its powerful merging and branching features

The post Features in TFSC are fairly standard among SCC tools appeared first on scmGalaxy.

• Scenario 1: The catch-up merge— The user wants to merge all changes from a source branch that have not yet been migrated to the target branch. The source and target can be a subtree or an individual file/folder.
• Scenario 2: The catch-up no-merge— The user wants to discard nonmerged changes in the source branch from the set of candidate changes for future merges between the specified source and target.
• Scenario 3: The cherry-pick merge— The user wants to merge individual change sets from the source branch to the target branch. Changes introduced to those files prior to the specified change set should not be migrated.
  • The user can specify the change sets to merge with a change set number.
  • The user can specify individual file revisions to merge between the source and target.
• Scenario 4: The cherry-pick no-merge— The user wants to discard a single change set from the list of all possible changes to merge between the source and target so that this change set never appears in the list of candidates for a cherry pick merge.
• Scenario 5: Merge history query— The user wants to know whether the specified change set has been merged into the target branch. If it has, the user wants to know what change set the merge was committed in. The user also wants to know if part of the change set has been merged, but not all.
• Scenario 6: Merge candidate query— The user wants to obtain a list of change sets that have been committed to a source branch but have not yet been migrated to the target branch. From this list, the user selects change sets to migrate with a cherry pick merge.

How TFSC Addresses the Scenarios

TFSC merging is designed to provide users with an extremely powerful and flexible tool for managing the contents of branches. Merges can be made into a single file or into a tree of related files. Merges can also migrate the entire change history of the specified source files or an individual change set or revision that might contain a specific fix or feature that should be migrated without moving other changes from the source in the process. Merging the entire change history prior to a given point in time is known as a catch-up merge (Scenarios 1 and 2), whereas selecting individual change sets or revisions to merge is known as a cherry-pick merge (Scenarios 3 and 4). The merge command also allows users to query for merge history and merge candidates and perform the actual merge operation.

TFSC presents merge history and candidate merges as a list of change sets that have or can be migrated between a source and a target branch. Merges can be made to a subset of files in a change set, creating a situation in which a partial change set has been merged. In this case, TFSC represents the partial state of the merge and allows the user to finish merging the change set later.

Merges are pending changes in TFSC. The user can choose to perform several merge operations within a workspace without committing changes following each merge. All these merges can be staged in the user’s workspace and committed with a single check-in as a single change set. In addition, the pending merge operation can be combined with the checkout and rename commands to interject additional changes to the files that will be committed with the merge.

Hopefully you followed this summary and are still with me. Now let’s go into how branching works in TFSC.

Reference: The Build Master: Microsoft’s Software Configuration Management Best Practices

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Branching is the SCM operation of creating an independent line of development for one or more files. In a sense, branching a file results in two identical copies of the original file that can be modified as desired. Changes in the old line are not, by default, reflected in the new line and vice versa. Explicit operations can be performed to merge changes from one branch into another.

There are many different reasons for branching and many different techniques to accomplish it. In the most common scenarios, branching is reasonably simple, but branching can become complicated. A complex system with lots of branched files can be hard to visualize. I recommend mapping this with a visual product (such as Visio) so that the picture is clear.

Following are a handful of scenarios in which branching is interesting. Any SCM team should adopt these definitions.

Release Branching

We’ve been working on a Version 1 release for a year now, and it is time to begin work on Version 2. We need to finish coding Version 1—fixing bugs, running tests, and so on—but many of the developers are finished with their Version 1 work (other than occasional interruption for bug fixes) and want to start designing and implementing features for Version 2. To enable this, we want to create a branch off the Version 1 tree for the Version 2 work. Over time, we want to migrate all the bug fixes we make in the process of releasing Version 1 into the Version 2 code base. Furthermore, we occasionally find a Version 1 bug that happens to be fixed already in Version 2. We want to migrate the fix from the Version 2 tree into the Version 1 tree.

Promotion Modeling

Promotion modeling is equivalent to release branching, where each phase is a release. It is a development methodology in which source files go through stages. Source files might start in the development phase, be promoted to the test phase, and then go through integration testing, release candidate, and release. This phasing serves a couple of purposes. It allows parallel work in different phases, and it clearly identifies the status of all the sources. Separate branches are sometimes used for each phase of the development process.

Developer Isolation

A developer (or a group) needs to work on a new feature that will be destabilizing and take a long time to implement. In the meantime, the developer needs to be able to version his changes (check in intermediate progress, and so on). To accomplish this, he branches the code that he intends to work on and does all his work independently. Periodically, he can merge changes from the main branch to make sure that his changes don’t get too far out of sync with the work of other developers. When he is done, he can merge his changes back into the main branch.

Developer isolation also applies when semi-independent teams collaborate on a product. Each team wants to work with the latest version of its own source but wants to use an approved version of source from other teams. The teams can accomplish this in two ways. In the first way, the subscribing team “pulls” the snapshot that it wants into its configuration, and in the second way, the publishing team publishes the “approved” version for all the client teams to pick up automatically.

Label Branching

We label important points in time, such as every build that we produce. A partner team picks up and uses our published builds on a periodic basis, perhaps monthly. A couple of weeks after picking up a build, the team discovers a blocking bug. It needs a fix quickly but can’t afford the time to go through the approval process of picking up an entirely new build. The team needs the build it picked up before plus one fix. To do this, we create a branch of the source tree that contains all the appropriate file versions that are labeled with the selected build number. We can fix the bug in that branch directly and migrate the changes into the “main” branch, or we can migrate the existing fix (if it had been done) from the “main” branch into the new partner build branch.

Component Branching

We have a component that performs a function (for simplicity, let’s imagine it is a single file component). We discover that we need another component that does nearly the same thing but with some level of change. We don’t want to modify the code to perform both functions; rather, we want to use the code for the old component as the basis for creating the new component. We could just copy the code into another file and check it in, but among other things, the new copy loses all the history of what brought it to this point. The solution is to branch the file. That way, both files can be modified independently, both can preserve their history, and bug fixes can be migrated between them if necessary.

Partial Branching

Partial branching is equivalent to component branching, where the “component” is the versioned product. In this case, we work on a product that has a series of releases. We shipped the Everett release and are working on the Whidbey release. As a general rule, all artifacts that make up each version should be branched for the release (source, tools, specs, and so on). However, some versioned files aren’t release specific. For example, we have an emergency contact list that has the home phone numbers for team members. When we update the list, we don’t want to be bothered with having to merge the changes into each of the product version branches, yet the developers who are enlisted in each version branch want to be able to sync the file to their enlistment.

Identifying Branches (Configurations)

When a file is branched, it is as if a new file is created. We need a way to identify that new file. Historically, this has been done by including the version number of the file as part of the name of the file. In such a mechanism, the version number consists of a branch number and a revision number. A branch number is formed by taking the version number of the file to be branched, appending an integer, and then adding a second integer as a revision number. For example, 1.2 becomes 1.2.1.1 (where 1.2.1 is the branch number and 1 is the revision number).

Reference: The Build Master: Microsoft’s Software Configuration Management Best Practices

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