Visual Studio integration

Enjoy all the features inside your favourite IDE

Visual Studio is one of the most used IDEs by Plastic SCM users out there and that's why we're trying to continuously improve our integration with it. In Plastic 3.0, we introduced a new Visual Studio Package for Visual Studio 2005 and higher. The new plugin allows our customers to implement full SCM operations.

New context menus available

Thanks to the new integration we were able to include much more functionality in the Visual Studio IDE.

All the views in the Plastic GUI are also available from View/Plastic SCM menu (it was there also in the former 2005 package, but now we added a "workspace explorer" too).

Why are we coming up with a new package?

  • We had originally offered very basic SCC integration, which is still maintained and enables compatibility with older versions of Visual Studio. However, we needed to overcome the old SCC limitations which will enable us to continue evolving the integration rapidly and without meaningless restrictions.
  • We are now able to add more integrated functionality: checkin behavior is now shared with the GUI and the same happens with the access to all the GUI views.
  • We have created a better base to continue evolving plugins and enable more innovative functionalities. We're considering a bunch of ideas to extract info in real time from the SCM and make it available while the programmer is coding, helping him to make the right decisions. Stay tuned because there will be a lot more coming.

Integrated annotate

The annotate is now available within the Visual Studio IDE.

Integrated history

Several users requested it in the past and in fact it is something we must have added long ago. But finally the history of an item can be browsed from within Visual Studio.

New pending changes view

The checkin window is now shared with the GUI, displaying the "pending changes" dialog.

Integrated diff

We've made several changes in the diff infrastructure for 3.0.6 and now there's a new configuration page on the wizard to set up the diff tools.

You can choose the "embedded diff viewer" (new) or the Plastic SCM diff tool (the old default) or set up your own diff tool. While this was possible in the past by manually editing the client.conf file, it's now easier through the new tab in the preferences window.