Version Control system Project Help.

Question

I am a intermediate level programmer with 2 years programming experience(1 year VC++ and 1 year C#.NET). I am required to design a version control system similar to Visual sourcesafe. This is required to run on a local area network (approx 50 users). From analysing some of the commercial products on the market. I have came to the decision that I have to use a database to store all data regarding checkins/checkouts in a database. The database will handle each transaction as a unit of work and avoid any lost update problems. But however I am not sure wheather the store the actual files as a binary buffer stream in the database or to store them on the local hard disk and save the path in the database. What is the better method and why? My current understanding of the project is to have a client server architecture using .NET remoting across TCP channels for performance however i believe there is limited security available for this option. How can i improve the security? I am hoping to make the server a multithreaded component using thread pooling to deal with concurrency. The requests will be queued using MSMQ and processed one by one. Is this an applausable solution. Is there any better alternatives?

shazaddin · Answer

Yes I have been doing some reading on web services. I agree with you that they are immune to firewalls which is a very nice feature. What about transactional support. I need each operation checkin/checkout to be atomic so that it does not conflict with another checkin or checkout. I also need to add support for request from multiple clients. To achieve this will i need to use MSMQ(Microsoft message queueing). Thnx for those articles i will have a look at them for sure.

james · Answer

Here is a series of very good articles on Web Services http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2002/April/WebServicesBasicsNBeyond.asp http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2002/April/WebServicesBasicsNBeyondP2.asp http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2002/April/WebServicesBasicsNBeyondP3.asp In my current project I'm using Web Services as middleware to handle the communication between my client apps and my database(s). If you're doing this on a local network then I would not think HTTP would cause any serious speed issues. One very nice thing of Web Services is that since they do use HTTP (port 80) they are immune to most firewall issues and are globally accessable. Now I have not worked with .Net remoting but I have read posts where people went that route instead of Web Services for various reasons. -James

shazaddin · Answer

Asynchronous web services. I have not had any exposure to web services development. However it clear says that web services use HTTP protocol therefore filetransfer could pose a problem because the speed. Could you please explain why Asynchronous web services would be good and how I can make use of them.

james · Answer

Ahh...I see...well then this may be a good situation to use asynchronous web services through ASP.NET.

shazaddin · Answer

This is because the company wants an inhouse product.

james · Answer

Why not just use Visual Source Safe?