Product Review: Visual Intercept and SourceGear Vault

You can check the result of poll on this blog right now: I am asking if you’d like to use a .NET application. The result shows more people prefer not.

Yes, binding to .NET Framework means you cannot use those applications on other platforms such as Linux, Unix and Mac OS. This limitation may not be even more terrible for enterprise users.

Visual Intercept and SourceGear Vault, although both are excellent products with amazing features, are tightly bind to Windows platform.

I never fall in love with any ASP applications because generally they are installed on Windows and require you to use Internet Explorer to access them (Firefox users know what I mean). That’s why I find Visual Intercept’s web interface hard to use (because I am a Firefox crazy).

Sometimes I do use Ubuntu to try out new techniques on Linux, where Vault clients are not officially compatible to Mono.

In all, if you want to target enterprise market, you’d better choose some platform independent language, such as Java, standard C++, Ruby, PHP, Python and so on. Only in that way, you can see your customers running your applications smoothly on most platforms.

(Updated: Paul, thanks for your comments. I know there are changes in Vault, and the Eclipse plug-in is a very promising one. However, there are still lots of things on the TODO list, like better Linux support without Eclipse. For an Embedded Software Engineer working on Linux, Eclipse is not a quite convenient IDE writing C/C++ code IMHO (I personally prefer NetBeans). Maybe SourceGear can follow Teamprise’s way, develop a client with Eclipse RCP.

I admire your Vault guys because I do C# programming, too. Vault is so amazing that it is totally built on .NET. The only pity is that Microsoft does not want .NET to go anywhere like Java and Mono is net yet strong enough.

Also now Elsinore releases IssueNet to replace Visual Intercept. Although I do not have a chance to touch that, I think Elsinore must make things better somehow.)