Tuesday 4 May 2010

Beyond Compare

As a tools developer for CA Gen, the fact that we also develop our tools with CA Gen has meant that we tend to 'build not buy'. In other words, when we find the need for some additional tools support as part of our own Gen development projects, we enhance our own tools. This approach then leads to extra functionality in the products that is almost always useful to our customers as well.

However there are certain 3rd party tools and utilities that we have purchased runtime licences for instead of building ourselves. Examples include the diagramming OCX that we have used for creating the Object Structure, Life-Cycle and Model Architecture diagrams in GuardIEn, the ftp/sftp utilities and the file compare tool.

For the file compare tool, we have used the freely distributable WinDiff tool with the option for customers to replace this with their own favourite product. However Windiff is a fairly basic tool, and some time ago we replaced this for internal use with Beyond Compare 3 (BC3).

We like BC3 so much, that for the 8.0 release of our products, we have purchased additional licences to be able to distribute BC3 to our customers as well.

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