We have just publish the following updates to the Code Spaces application.

• Fixed Require SSL Support
  If you select “Applicaion Requires SSL” or “Login Requires SSL” in the Code Spaces admin section this will be reflected by the App.

• SVN Over SSL Option
  You have always been able to use svn over SSL, however you now have the option in the Code Spaces admin section to force SSL.

• Activity Timeline
  You will notice a new tab names “Activity Timeline”, this is a simple top down view of your project activity.

• Time Tracking
  We have moved the time tracking attributes to a tab inside the Work Item editor and added estimates and actual attributes (We will be creating Burn Rate and velocity graphs for the next release).

• Language Support
  We have added support for multiple languages (although we currently only have English) and will be adding more languages this week, including German, French and Spanish. Please let us know if you require any other languages.

That’s about all for now ;-)

As always let us know if you have any issues and/or comments…

Cheers,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

We are pleased to announce the availability of Code Spaces v2.5, this is the first in a series of updates that will bring us to v3.0 over the coming months.

This update includes many foundational enhancements, performance updates and extra scaling options, including:

• Infrastructure Update
  All the Code Spaces SVN, App and database servers are now running on Amazon EC2 and as such we have updated all components to take advantage of the almost limitless scaling opportunities.

• Changes to Plans
  With our new found abundance of space and processing power we have updated the Code Spaces Plans, in a nut shell all plans now have unlimited projects and repositories and the FREE plan now has 500MB of disk space (10x what it was).

• Card Walls
  A new tab has been introduced to Code Spaces between the Dashboard and Work Items called “Card Wall”. A Card wall is a visualization of Work items, and allows work items to be displayed as cards in virtual swim lanes that represent categories such as Work Item Status, or Assigned To. Within the context of a milestone Card Walls give Agile teams the ability to plan, estimate, do Stand Ups, etc all from the Code Spaces UI. The Card Wall section also allows for convenient dragging and dropping between swim lanes, so re-allocating or prioritizing work items couldn’t be easier.

• Browser Rendering Issues
  All known IE6, 7 and 8 rendering issues have been resolved. Firefox 3+ exhibited rendering issues on the Code Spaces Dashboard where the timeline would bleed through any components above like menus or dialogs. This has been resolved.

• Email Notifications
  Users can now receive email notifications from activity in the Code Spaces forums. Admins can now specify user notification preferences in the User Admin section.

• Return URLs
  Previously the Code Spaces application would redirect to the login page when an login was required which is great, however the context of the request was lost and the user would not be returned back to the page they requested after a successful login, this has now been resolved.

• Backup Changes
  We now use the snapshot feature of Amazons Elastic Block storage to take block level backups every 10 minutes, we are also taking actual backups of each repository as a commit occurs meaning we have a much greater capacity to respond to failure.

A few other not so noteworthy bugs have been fixed and many performance improvements have been applied.

As i mentioned this is one of many updates that we will be applying over the coming months, v2.6 is scheduled to go live in exactly one month from now ;-)

As always please Contact Us if you have any suggestions ;-)

Many Thanks,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

We will be taking down the Subversion cluster on Sunday the 27th April for planned maintenance and server upgrades.

The outage will occur between 10:00 GMT and 13:00 GMT and all subversion repositories will be unavailible during this time.

Please Contact Us for further information.

For the last 3 months we have been working on a major update to Code Spaces and as we are now getting to the end of the development phase, I though I would share with you some of the features that will be included in the new Version.

Document Module

This is a basic document management module that allows you to store documents outside of your Subversion Repositories which can be linked to Work Items, Wiki pages or forums. The idea is that you can store specs and requirement documents here and link them to particular work items. These documents can also be marked as public which means they can be accessed by non Code Spaces user via the project portal.

Project Portal

Each Project can have a Project Portal which is a public facing view of your project. Elements of your project like Work Items, Wiki Pages, Subversion Repositories, Forum Threads and Documents can be marked as marked as public adding them to your project portal. Your customers and users can access the project portal at any time to raise issues, download files, Participate in the Forums, etc… The project portal look and feel can be changed by selecting on of the many themes. Project Portals are optional and can be switched off for any project that does not require public access.

Email Notifications

Code Spaces already exposes notificatoins through RSS, however each user now has the option to recieve notifications via Email.

Twitter Notifications

Each project can send notifications like Subversion Commits, Work Item status changes, Milestone completion/creation, etc to a desigbated Twitter account.

Project Email Addresses

Each project now has an email address which you can use to send messages into the project, messages recieved via this address will be turned into work items. Project Admins can specifiy white lists to avoid spam.

Anonymous Subverison Access

Each Subversion repository can be set to allow anonymous read access enabling you to give out a repository url to your customers or colleagues.

Fragment Caching

Code Spaces heavily uses fragment caching to speed up page requests, Dashboard and Work Item pages are now on average 20x faster, other pages also show impressive improvements.

Bug Fixes

All know issues have been resolved.

RELEASE DATE We are planning to release v2.0 into the production environment at the end of this month (Feb 2008).

NOTE This version was origionally scheduled to be released as v1.1 but due to the amount of new features in this release we have decided to jump to v2.0

UPGRADES All customer will recieve this version for FREE and will get access to ALL the new features, except for FREE users who will not get the Project Portal functoinality.

STAND ALONE VERSION The Code Spaces Stand Alone version (currently not released) will be based on the v2.0 code base, and is scheduled for a Beta release in March-April 2008.

Today we have increased the disk space limit for our Free accounts from 10mb to 50mb.

Again this is part of our ongoing improvement program but we also found that the 10mb restriction didn’t really allow you to run a project efficiently.

As always we don’t count backups or database data in this restriction its purely Subversion data, so you should have plenty to keep you going.