First Time Using Perforce
Here is a story of my first time usage of Perforce.
As an undergrad Computer-Science student, you often have to overcome objectives of learning a new tool or technology. For my Global Software Engineering course, we were encouraged to learn and use Perforce. Perforce is a well-articulated version-control software.
Setting up Perforce wasn’t too difficult as the professor in the class gave the details of the port and gave certain instructions that properly enabled me to connect to the depot (server). My assumption is that when I enter the work-field the project leader will provide me with the connection information. Not too much of a challenge here, and I would advise others to also relax in this portion.
Next I created a new workspace that is on my local machine. What is important to understand when working on projects using Perforce is that you never work on the actual project, you simply work on a copy of the project on your local computer (workspace). You then attempt to add the changes and document what changes you made to the main project. When you commit the changes fully, you are telling the main project “Hey! These are the changes I made to the project, so adjust it to the actual project”, at the commit point it is Perforce job to Merge the local work done to the main project. Perforce keeps track of all the versions of the project in case some back-tracking needs to be done.
After I set up my workspace properly, I faced a challenge. My first time using Perforce, how do I actually do the add/edit/delete functions on Perforce? Eventually after running through the documentation for Perforce, things began to make sense. Before I knew it, I was adding files, editing files, and deleting files. These are just some of the challenges faced by Computer-Scientists. In order to implement a new technology, you must read into it.
Next we were instructed to demonstrate our understanding of Perforce. We were instructed to create a Fibonacci program using C# and pushing it up to the server. After playing around with the adding/editing/deleting files functions on Perforce, I began to understand how to navigate my way through it. I created the C# console program and pushed my code to the depot. I committed the changes. I was able to view it on the Depot and to test it, I ran the program straight from the Depot. MISSION SUCCESS. BOOM.
