I have been listening to several podcasts over the last couple of months. I have to say I am hooked on some of the technical shows. Whenever I am in the car I listen to a podcast. The radio in my car is rarely tuned on. I use a Dell Axim x50v with Media Player 10 and iPodder 1.1.4. I have been spending a lot of time trying to get the content to synchronise correctly. I am not sure if it is iPodder, Media player or my Active Sync program that has problems with this. But for some reason at times I noticed podcasts that are on my PC but are not on my Pocket PC. I think there is an update to Active Sync I do not have so I am going to try this first to solve my problem.

I have a few grips on this setup

• There needs to be a purge podcasts after x days setting.
• Finding new podcasts on the device is a real pain. Need a playlist that can be settup to show podcasts added in the last x days.
• Organizing podcasts with playlists is a real pain.
• Deleting podcasts on the Pocket PC should delete it from the PC. I don't want the podcast once I hear it and I listen to 90% of them on the Pocket PC.
• I need bookmarks. Stopping a podcast and starting it later is a pain.
• The media center interface is clunky. I have to click too many menu items to get to a playlist.
• The buttons and the screen on the Pocket PC are way too easy to bump while listening to a podcast.

I found one product that made finding podcasts on the pocket PC while driving real easy. Voice Command from Microsoft. However I am not convinced I want to stick with Microsoft Media Player just yet, so I have not purchased Voice Command. The trial version worked out very well. I could ask the device to play music and it would come back with questions that would lead me down to a particular play list. Once in a play list I could easily skip ahead to next tracks without taking my eyes off the road.

Well I signed up for the CodeCamp that is coming to Charlotte, NC on April 30th 2005. Early registration was opened to Developers Guild members. There are only 200 seats so I was glad I got in early. I have never attended a CodeCamp before but as I look at the Session Lineups of other CodeCamps I think I will not be let down. It was announced at the Developers Guild meeting this month that Design Patterns was the top track requested so far on the polls they did.

Well I finally got around to checking out Vault by SourceGear. I used to be an avid source safe user for a long time. I have even used SourceGear's SourceOffSite for a while on a project for BattleBots.  However I have been forced to use PVCS at my day job. I have never liked the client for PVCS and now that I work virtual I dislike it even more. I won't go into details about why I dislike PVCS because this post is about Vault.

Some reasons I chose Vault:
• Free for single users
• Works on SQL Server
• Built on .Net Built with remote users in mind
• Seems to be getting good reviews from users
• Works a lot like source safe (from a functionality perspective). Have I mentioned how much I hate PVCS :)
• Integrated with a Bug Tracking program also authored by Sourcegear

You can see some other good reasons why to use Vault over Source Safe from Eric Sink CEO of Source Gear.

Installing Vault on my local machine was a real breeze. Installing it on WebHosts4Life was a little trickier, but not that bad at all. Using the client application has been a real joy. I have used it off and on for 2 weeks now and I have to say it has some cool built in features. It is also very responsive as far as I can tell. I don't have any real big projects under source control yet, but just using it with what I have is very fast.

Some of the coolest features I like:
• Adding new files by folder with file extension filtering (already tailored for .Net development).
• Showing what source is out of sync due to changes made localy or in the repository.
• Merging local files with repository files is a breeze when local changes where modified without the source being checked out.  All you have to do is check out the files and an automatic merge can be done.
• Searching for files by many options
• Treating check ins as one complete transaction (although I don't see how to place new files in this transaction, but that is not really necesary)

All in all I would highly recommend Vault to anyone. If I ever get a project that requires multiple developers I will definantely be using Vault as my source control program.

I am in the process of adding NAnt tasks for Vault command line operations.  I know I can do this already by using the NAnt exec task but I wanted to capture the errors and success state that comes back as xml from the Vault command and expose them as properties that can be acted appon within NAnt build scripts.