Deson Technology

Headquarters

Hong Kong, China
http://www.deson.com/

Industry

Construction contractor

Dynamsoft Customer

Since 2010

Need

Needed a fast, reliable way to access VSS over the Internet

The Solution

Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere for VSS

"SourceAnywhere for VSS have a good feature set. The following 2 features matter to us the most:
1. The out-standard and unbelievable check out/ check in speed over internet
2. User friendly interface"

David Lai
Deson Technology Limited

Deson Technology Limited Adopted Dynamsoft's SourceAnywhere for VSS

Deson Technology is a founding member of Asian Institute of Intelligent Buildings. They are principally engaged as a system integrator in intelligent buildings business, actively take part in various projects and sales distribution in major cities/provinces in China and Hong Kong. Deson Technology has formed joint venture companies with other renowned international intelligent building services providers.

Business Needs

Deson Technology provides customizable intelligent buildings solutions for customers. During the project implementation, offsite programmers work on the customer's site for faster response and better communication, while onsite programmers test the code in the company office.

They were using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe for version control and central source code storage. The VSS database resides in the company office, and offsite programmers use VSS (Internet) Plug-In to access the database.

While the team is enjoying VSS's straightforward version control functionalities, two problems showed up:

Firstly, the internet access is very slow for the offsite programmers. It was almost unbearable. This also affected the onsite test and programming team, since the offsite and onsite users' code could not be synchronized in time. Sometimes developers overwrite each other's work by mistake without realizing it.

Secondly, VSS (Internet) Plug-In does not support Big5 code, which is the encoding method used for Traditional Chinese characters. The programmers need to version control the source code manually. It took them a lot of effort to synchronize each one's source code version.

So the team began to look for a solution which supports Big-5 code and allows offsite users to work with VSS through internet like in the company office. They evaluate SourceAnywhere for VSS and two other solutions, and SourceAnywhere became their final choice because of the performance and friendly GUI.

The Solution

An add-on tool for Visual SourceSafe, SourceAnywhere for VSS utilizes client/server architecture with caching to solve the major issues of VSS. It is recommended by Microsoft as a remote and cross platform access solution to VSS.

SourceAnywhere for VSS was created with four core objectives in mind:

  • Performance - To deliver the fastest remote access possible over TCP/IP.
  • With SourceAnywhere for VSS, the VSS repository only interacts with SourceAnywhere for VSS Server, which is local to the VSS database. Furthermore, SourceAnywhere for VSS introduces Cache Server to further improve VSS performance for distributed developments.
  • Security - To apply a fail-safe approach to moving code assets across the Web, sharing the database folders totally exposes your valuable data to the outside, which may potentially cause the data to be copied or damaged. With SourceAnywhere for VSS, the VSS database is only exposed to the SourceAnywhere for VSS Server. The security is greatly improved and database corruption issue decreased.
  • Multi-Platform Support - To provide broad platform support and integrate with the industry's most popular OS and IDEs.
  • SourceSafe GUI Similarity - To ensure easy migration for developers and remove the learning curve totally.

Business Result

The offsite programmers noticed the performance improvement right away. They were amazed not only by the outstanding speed of the most used operations, but also the friendly and familiar user interface. "The speed for source code check in/check out is unbelievable", said David Lai. "And we didn't overwrite other programmer's code with the wrong version anymore."

SourceAnywhere for VSS affects David and his coworkers a lot. "We save a lot of time on version control when someone needs to stay on customer's site for testing. We can close out the project more efficiently", David explained, "My offsite programmers have the same opinion as me. "

Before adopting SourceAnywhere for VSS, programmers have to keep one copy for every release version and exchange the modified code to each other via email or other methods. "SourceAnywhere for VSS has a good impact on our whole development cycles. Good product. It's a right choice", concluded David.

About Dynamsoft

Dynamsoft Corporation is the leading developer of version control and issue tracking software. Many Fortune 500 companies including HP, IBM and Intel use Dynamsoft solutions for version control, issue tracking.

About SourceAnywhere for VSS

An add-on tool for VSS, SourceAnywhere for VSS is the fastest VSS remote access software. It is also recommended by Microsoft for VSS remote and cross-platform access.

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