User editing without getting latest

[Lane]

We have a user who has, several times now, begun editing a file in Visual Studio and it has not first retrieved the latest version from Vault. He has then checked in his changes and overwritten previous changes.

This is costing us critical development time, and we need to understand if there is any setting we need to change to make this work correctly. No other user is having this issue, and it has happened often enough that we can rule out user error.

We're using 4.1.4.18402 with Visual Studio 2008 and the Enhanced Client.

Thanks.

[lbauer]

The Enhanced Client should automatically checkout a file when the user starts editing it, which should also get the latest version. If two users check out a file at the same time and modify it and userA checks in his changes, then userB should get a needs merge alert.

Is your user seeing any of the above behavior?

Is the user working in Vault with CVS mode, rather than VSS mode? (This setting is in VS under Tools->Options->Vault Options->Advanced Options->Concurrent Development Style.

Is the user seeing any error messages in the Output tab of Visual Studion (enable this in VS under View->Output.

Are there any errors in the Vault Server log associated with the user's login that might indicate a problem getting a file to the client? The Vault Server log It's called sgvault.log and is in %windir%\temp\sgvault on the server machine.

[Lane]

We have had another instance of this. Different user, but the same Visual Studio project. It happens to be an ASP.Net MVC project, the only one we are working on, though I don't see why that would make any difference.

There is no contention issue. The user edits the file in VS, it is automatically checked out, but it is not getting the latest version. Then they check in and overwrite changes previously made by another user. No one is working in CVS mode, and no errors are showing up in the log.

[lbauer]

What setting do these users have in Visual Studio under Tools->Options->Source Control->Vault Options->Advanced Options->Local Files->Modified Working Copy?

When the user opens Visual Studio, is there an hourglass next to the file(s) they're modifying, indicating the file is out of date?

[Lane]

They have "Attempt Automatic Merge." But how can that have any bearing? They don't have a modified working copy. This is a case of users editing files without getting latest, and checking them in. They are not seeing the hourglass.

[lbauer]

Is this problem reproducible, or is it random? If it's possible to reproduce this, we can have you enable client logging and see what the log files report.

[Lane]

Unfortunately, it seems to be random.

[ian_sg]

Hi Lane.

I suspect that Vault is getting the latest version of the file, but Visual Studio isn't reloading it in an open editor. We fixed a bug specific to Visual Studio's DBML editor after 4.1.4 shipped that I think may also cause the intermittent behavior you're seeing in an MVC project.

There is an unreleased 4.1.5 client that has this fix and will work with your 4.1.4 server. You can download it here.

This same fix also shipped in the Vault 5.0 release should you decide to upgrade down the road.

If you try one of these and still see the problem, by all means let us know.

Sorry for the inconvenience.