P4UI

Check out: software (and source) -- screenshots

Disclaimer:This project isn't genuinely useful. It's a snapshot of my ideas and progress. If you really like the idea, drop me a line, and encourage me to work on it some more.

About the Project

Back when I was working at 3dfx, I came to use the SourceSafe GUI, and found it rather nice. The trouble was, I found SourceSafe itself terribly unreliable -- My source control system of choice is Perforce. My experience with the SourceSafe GUI got me thinking how good things would be there were a similar GUI for Perforce. (Perforce GUI lovers don't be offended, it's UI seems to be an acquired taste that I care not to acquire)

At first I investigated Java. Afterall, I figured it would be the best if the effort would yeild a cross-platform GUI. However, like the last two times I tried to use Java, I found it immature, slow, and painfaul to interface external code to. The fact that Perforce's p4lib is a C++ library instead of C library makes things even harder.

After deciding once again Java/Swing wasn't ready for prime time, I decided to learn and try out Visual Basic. I've learned all I ever want to know about VB5, and can safetly say I think it's a horrible language. My biggest gripes being the lack of preinitialized data syntax, first class functions (i.e. function pointers), and general brokenness of the associative array implementation (i.e. collections).

The intent of the form based UI building stuff is interesting, but it turns out much more painful than it should be. Making forms which resize well is painful, most of the property pages are severely lacking, and the basic controls are buggy. The NEXTSTEP Interface Builder is far more powerful.

All in all, it proved a great way to get 60-70% of the idea working, and it also proved incapable of handling the other 30-40% in any decent fashion.

What works

Browsing the depot
File or directory revision history (right click on dir or file)
File Ops:
- Revert
- check out
- View(whether in the client or not)/Edit
The check-in dialog (but you can't actually check in the files yet)

What dosn't work

some operations like rename, check-in, and directory operations
The options dialog (it's not being looked at yet)
some checkboxes and options in other dialogs don't work yet

Known Issues

The tree view gets weird sometimes... it's bugs in the Control itself, I'm trying to figure out a workaround. Also, I tried to make it not expand or contract when you double-click, but when the selection gets confused, it sometimes collapses everything by mistake... working on it.
It's pretty SLOW. This is because of how I'm forced to envoke the perfoce command line. When I can connect to the client library it'll be much faster.
it just talks to the perforce command line in your path, so you have to make sure one is there and that it's client and p4port are setup correctly.

Check out: software -- screenshots