Tobi + C# = T#

I didn’t find any commit monitor for Mercurial repositories. I am currently working on a project with multiple people pushing to one repository – and of course I want to know as soon as possible when one of the others did commit new source code. That way we can resolve merge conflicts soon and get a nice code review loop going.

Hg Commit Monitor uses the atom feeds of repositories to detect new commits. It was quite important for me that it does get out of my way and sight – unless I need to be notified. So it will just sit in the tray and only communicate via balloons.

If you are interested in such a tool, you can download it from here. I did publish both a compiled version and a snapshot of the mercurial repository.

Currently Hg Commit Monitor needs .NET 3.5. But if you want to run it on mono, please contact me and I will replace the reference to System.ServiceModel.Syndication with a third party Atom parser.

Screenshot Main Window V. 1.0.1

What can I tell you – I have been using git for a bit a while ago, and I really liked it … in a pure linux environment. It was a bit awkward when using windows. So I went back to subversion when doing my .NET development.

But I really did miss the offline functionality that is one of the biggest advantages (in my eyes) of DSCMs. Listening to a stackoverflow podcast lately I heard Joel rave on about Mercurial. So I thought I have to check it out myself – and I have to say, I am more than a bit impressed. I was able to set up a windows machine and a linux machine with hg within minutes. Creating a hg push repository using apache was a breeze as well. All with authentication.

When it comes to using hg: Even using the command line interface is a not too annoying. I went through update, pull, push, merge, … I even simulated merge conflicts. Easy! And using the graphlog extension it is quite simple to view the logs and all the paths that lead to the current version. All in all, it seriously was not a bit of trouble. And I haven’t even installed tortoiseHg yet… But that’s for tomorrow.

Conclusion: I guess I do have to switch from svn to hg. There simply is no need to put it off anymore. Should I dare to ask my boss, if we could switch at work as well?!