I have a habit of leaving things unfinished if I find my self having solved the nitty gritty details. That last stretch stuff just isn't as fun as the technical challenges. Though that's a topic for another day.
This week I contracted a bad case of the flu. I've spent the last several days in bed trying to regain some strength. Laying there thinking (not really accomplishing much of anything) I thought I'd reboot that source code control plug-in for Visual Studio.
The thing about Mercurial (and this is equally true for git) is that it's super easy to get started. And with it you can distribute, patch and hack away effortlessly in mere minuets. What I felt was missing was a source control package for Visual Studio that embraced the same principles.
For all the SVN tools out there TortoiseSVN always struck me as odd because it attempts to turn every last folder in your computer into a version controlled system by integrating with the Windows Explorer Shell. I never got that and was somewhat surprised that TortoiseHg even existed. Mercurial not being SVN makes it somewhat less of an atrocity but I can't believe that people actually wants to use these GUI tools.
Unhappy with the performance of existing plug-ins for Visual Studio I decided to roll my own and I figured that it be a good opportunity to learn how to build Visual Studio Extensions.
I actually have decent statistics of the number of hours a day I actually spend within Visual Studio actively doing stuff. Learning more about the Visual Studio extensibility model felt like a smart move.
I have a very clear vision of where I wanna go from here, it's also my attempt at an open source project. I don't really have any strong feelings about open source but I've always learned a lot by reading source code. This could be a good opportunity to give something back.
If you're a Visual Studio user looking for a Mercurial SCC plug-in checkout VSX Mercurial on Codeplex.
I abandoned this project sometime ago. Mercurial is still a great tool but I use TFS and git today. I also find that the kind of integration I was planning with VSX Mercurial wasn't really what I needed, git extensions taught me this.
