13 November 2009 ­ PureCM, the configuration management specialist, has announced the latest version of its software configuration management (SCM) solution, PureCM 2009-2.  This major release offers much tighter integration into the development environment of software development teams, boosting productivity and making collaboration easier.

Developers can now use the enhanced Visual Studio integration to easily perform task-based development within their IDE.  Features originally available in PureCM only are now available directly within Visual Studio, providing developers with intuitive control of their changes and complete transparency of project progress.

Enhanced Visual Studio integration boosts developer productivity

The enhanced Visual Studio integration dramatically improves ease-of-use and productivity along the whole developer workflow.  Developers can switch to project branches without rebinding solutions and group their current changes within their IDE to reflect different tasks.  Collaboration is facilitated as features like shelving and unshelving changes for code review, or integrating changes from other branches are now directly available within Visual Studio.

“Prior to the launch of this enhanced Visual Studio integration, PureCM already allowed developers to perform basic source control tasks such as checkout or checkin via Microsoft’s SCC API”, explains Mike Shepherd, technical consultant at PureCM. “While the SCC standard is great to integrate with a wide variety of tools used in the development lifecycle, it has some serious limitations if you want to support collaboration features such as shelving.  Offering an enhanced integration was the logical consequence, because of the opportunities it gives us to make life easier for developers with future releases.”

Rod Weir, founder and MD of helpdesk software company PRD Software said:  “PureCM 9.2 gives much tighter integration with Visual Studio, which means developers can do key tasks such as managing changesets, merging changes and getting line-by-line histories to find bugs directly in Visual Studio, instead of having to swap continually between the Visual Studio and CM tool user interfaces.  It saves us time and helps avoid errors.”

Up to 400% performance increase

The enhanced Visual Studio integration is complemented with new plugins for Windows Explorer and Axosoft’s bug tracking tool OnTime.  They add to the many out-of-the-box integrations already available, including various build and modelling tools.  For users interested in custom integration, the .NET and Java SDKs have been enhanced to include the latest PureCM features. This assures that users get easy access to project data from their favourite tool, regardless of their role in the development lifecycle.

While PureCM has always focused on performance to optimise support for distributed development, the 2009-2 release marks another substantial improvement with up to 400% faster submit performance when compared to its predecessor.  In combination with highly efficient delta transfer and data compression, PureCM 2009-2 is claimed to be one of the fastest SCM solutions on the market.

New PureCM editions tailored to address different customer needs

Together with the 2009-2 release, PureCM also introduces two editions of their SCM solution:  PureCM Standard and PureCM Professional.  With both editions including the proven version control core, and integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse, users get a lightweight but highly scalable solution.  Optimised for more complex and larger projects, PureCM Professional adds automated change inheritance across branches, issue tracking and reporting to provide users with a fully featured change and configuration management solution.

A free trial of PureCM 2009-2 is available from:  http://www.purecm.com/downloads.php