Pickling - it's not just cucumbers anymore

We programmers on the EverQuest II team discovered a neat little utility the other day.

We have so much data and source code in Perforce for EverQuest II that our administrator frowns at creating branches. We only have three branches aptly named "main", "test" and "live" and we do all of our development out of "main" including expansion features and live game updates (there are other challenges to overcome with this configuration, but I'll just go into one).

Occasionally, I'll be working on a feature and will have a significant amount of critical files checked out and modified. At this very moment something comes up: a live game crash, a higher priority, etc.

Enter Code Pickle. This nifty little utility allows you to suspend an entire changelist. All your current changes are safely stored freeing you up to handle the immediate priority. After handling the emergency, you can then resume your changelist just as if you were never interrupted. If the files in the suspended changelist have other changes, Code Pickle helps you integrate them. And at $600 for a 10 user license, it's well worth it.

Code Pickle supports multiple source control packages, but I've only tried it with Perforce. Try out the demo!