Ken Brubaker

The ClavèCoder

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Kenneth Brubaker
Senior Application Architect

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No need for revision comments in code

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 and TFS 2008, there is now even less of a reason to place any revision comments in the code base. Once upon a time all reputable source control systems had a keyword expansion feature that included the revision comments for all revisions in the source file.

Version control managers de-emphasize this feature because users should use the repository for getting comments, which is tooling accessible and if readers rely on the code base for the revision comments, developers are less likely to provide good revision comments.

The keywords feature is totally removed from TFS. I think this is a mistake (though welcome because keyword support is a pain). I have heard that there are some compliance requirements that comments for code changes must appear in the code base. Of course the requirement itself is from the dark ages, but nonetheless, it should be supported.

Apart from  those that must support the above requirement, some development teams prefer inline revision comments (i.e., // RKK 03/02/98: Fixed bug 2937 ) so that they know that a certain area of code has been "touched," since, as we all know, fixing one bug begets another and finding who touched a line of code in a version control system usually requires a binary search of diff'ing to find the offender.

TFS 2008 and VS2008 fix this problem. The new annotations feature permits one to easily see exactly who updated each line of code with a quick link to revision comments.

This feature has been provided with the TFS Power Tools for a while now. However with its integration into the IDE, it is a simple case for version control managers to make to prohibit the use of file header and inline revision comments.

posted on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 8:54 AM by kenbrubaker


# re: No need for revision comments in code @ Wednesday, November 28, 2007 11:43 AM

Nice to see MS catching up with the rest of the modern version control world.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/blame.html

Greg

# re: No need for revision comments in code @ Thursday, December 06, 2007 9:12 AM

This feature (Annotation) was released as a power tool soon after TFS went GA. What was nice was that it was very integrated from the get-go. You can't get it all in the first release. The 2008 version of TFS is just a mainenance release. Rosario is v2. I can't wait for v3. As a version control system it will be on par with subversion. But TFS, as an extensible application lifecycle product, goes way beyond subversion.

kenbrubaker




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