Skip to main content

Shout-out for Good Customer Service: Abstrakti

Let me give a shout-out to Abstrakti Software for a job well done and excellent customer service.

My small team recently completed a project to move all of our development work from Visual Source Safe to Git source control management. Our code base was very large, with hundreds of thousands of source files across dozens of VSS projects spanning more than 17 years of history.

Preserving the VSS History was one of the project's top priorities, and for that we looked into a handful of tools that were designed for just that purpose.


A strong early candidate was the open-source C# project Vss2Git. It was pretty good, and we had access to the source, a nice plus. But in early tests, the resulting repositories had errors. They were very rare, maybe one file in a thousand would end up in the repository with no history and no revisions other than the first one. Nothing in the limited logs it produced indicated whether there was a problem or on which files. We experimented briefly with the source, to get more information and see what we could do, but then set it aside to research other options.

Next we looked at the Castellum product from Abstrakti. The free trial version was quite limiting, but its user interface was clear and its logging feedback let us know in advance which files were having trouble. Yes, Castellum also had trouble with some files - it turns out that we had some corruptions in a dozen files in our VSS database, affecting mostly revisions prior to 2009. Vss2Git gave no hint of this, but it was easy to parse the Castellum log and identify these files, then use that knowledge and the Castellum UI to omit them from the conversion and handle them manually.

We were so impressed that we bought the Small-Business license and set to converting our files. It allowed us to do our conversions into dozens of new repositories in stages, using their Before / After feature, and by selecting sub-sets of our projects and files. All the flexibility that we needed was in Castellum.

So the tool itself was very good, definitely worth the money.

Beyond that, the customer service from Abstrakti was also very good. Any time we had questions, they replied promptly, as promised. When we found a bug in one feature, they fixed it quickly. They reassured us about our license and use of Castellum even after our conversion server went through a series of hardware issues. When we requested even more logging, they provided that as well. For example, one of our files had thousands of revisions and the product would appear to hang. But when they added more logging, it was clear that Castellum was still chugging away on that massive and oft-changed file, and it was our own history that was taking so long to parse and convert.

Thank you, Abstrakti! We are now live with Git and your software was an essential part of getting here.

Popular posts from this blog

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc

Java 8: Rewrite For-loops using Stream API

Java 8 Tip: Anytime you write a Java For-loop, ask yourself if you can rewrite it with the Streams API. Now that I have moved to Java 8 in my work and home development, whenever I want to use a For-loop, I write it and then see if I can rewrite it using the Stream API. For example: I have an object called myThing, some Collection-like data structure which contains an arbitrary number of Fields. Something has happened, and I want to set all of the fields to some common state, in my case "Hidden"

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history:  http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For this

Code Coverage in C#.NET Unit Tests - Setting up OpenCover

The purpose of this post is to be a brain-dump for how we set up and used OpenCover and ReportGenerator command-line tools for code coverage analysis and reporting in our projects. The documentation made some assumptions that took some digging to fully understand, so to save my (and maybe others') time and effort in the future, here are my notes. Our project, which I will call CEP for short, includes a handful of sub-projects within the same solution. They are a mix of Web APIs, ASP MVC applications and Class libraries. For Unit Tests, we chose to write them using the MSTest framework, along with the Moq mocking framework. As the various sub-projects evolved, we needed to know more about the coverage of our automated tests. What classes, methods and instructions had tests exercising them, and what ones did not? Code Coverage tools are conveniently built-in for Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, but not for our Professional Edition installations. Much less for any Commun