We’re proud to launch a new sub-product of XP-Dev.com called Dedicated Instances

Dedicated Instances are basically your very own XP-Dev.com platform running on a virtual machine dedicated to you. There are a few things that you can do with these VMs:

• Map your own domain name (for e.g. projects.mycompany.com) for the whole platform
• Tighter security – you have access to logs for audit reasons, and can apply custom & complex permissioning
• Run your own app, server and software (continuous integration, staging deployment, etc)
• Multiple datacentre locations to improve network latencies – at the moment in Germany, East & West Coast US. Asia and Australia to follow up real soon
• Platform customisation – we can customise xp-dev.com and even Trac projects to your heart’s content

Essentially, it is a managed virtual machine where we have slapped on an instance of XP-Dev.com for you, and you can use it as a general server as well. We’ll monitor it, and manage backups as well. All you have to do is well, nothing :)

Head over to the dedicated instances pricing page to explore the features in detail and signup.

If you have any questions, please do raise a support ticket or drop us an email admin@xp-dev.com

We’ve just made a major update to XP-Dev.com. Listed below are some of the major changes.

A brand new UI:

The new UI is skinnable to your own taste, though we can’t released that out just yet. This should be out next.

There have been a number of changes in the workflow of the interface to make it more intuitive and clearer. If you don’t like how something has changed in the new UI, then do drop a support ticket and we’ll have a look.

HTTP/HTTPS access for Git and Mercurial

A really long wait for this one, bit its finally here! You can pull/push Git and Mercurial repositories over HTTP and HTTPS.

Additionally, Gitweb and HGWeb have been enabled as well.

General Platform Upgrades and Enhancements

The new platform has so far been our fastest to date! We’ve minimised our memory and CPU usage which has improved overall performance.

The most important change to us is that this new release allows us to do some fancy things, which will be coming up in the next few months when we begin rolling out a number of new auxiliary products for XP-Dev.com.

We will be moving our servers and equipment between datacenters on 10th September 2011. We are planning on disconnecting all our equipment at around 9am London BST. This will result in the whole of xp-dev.com being down for 10 hours while we transport and re-rack the equipment up in the new datacenter. This may change a little depending on traffic (so far, I can’t find any planned roadworks/distruptions in our journey route). We are planning on being back online at around 7pm London BST.

We will be sending out emails as well as this is quite a long downtime where you won’t be able to access your projects and repositories.

The reason we are doing this is that we are currently running out of capacity in our current datacenter and have just struck a pretty neat deal with our new datacenter providers. We need this capacity to begin rolling out some new products for xp-dev.com, which is just round the corner!

We’ll drop a note once everything is back running and we have completed our initial tests that everything is healthy.

Update: Migration completed

As part of the latest release we’ve start making our URLs a bit neater.

In the past, Subversion repositories and Trac projects URLs followed the pattern below:

Subversion repositories: svn{server-node}.xp-dev.com/svn/<repository-name>
So, you would end up with a Subversion repository hosted from svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/myrepository

And, Trac projects: trac{server-node}.xp-dev.com/<project-name>
So, you would end up with a Trac project hosted from trac2.xp-dev.com/myproject

Looks convoluted ? Well, it was, and we’ve made it much simpler by getting rid of the svn{server-node} and trac{server-node} subdomains. From now on your Subversion repositories and Trac project URLs should be based on:

Subversion repositories: xp-dev.com/svn/<repository>
So you would end up with a Subversion repository hosted from xp-dev.com/svn/myrepository

Trac projects: xp-dev.com/trac/<project>
So, you would end up with a Trac project hosted from xp-dev.com/trac/myproject

If you’re unsure of how these URLs are applied to your projects and repositories, do head to your Project’s Trac and Source Control tab in XP-Dev.com. It should show the correct URLs to use.

A lot of these changes have been done to make way for upcoming new features.

We are doing sensible redirects where possible (to preserve some backwards compatibility), but you should update your bookmarks as soon as possible, and if you need to, perform a Subversion Relocate on your locally checked out Subversion working copies.

If you have any problems, please do raise a support ticket and we’ll look into it.

It has been a couple of years since we launched a new platform that’s running XP-Dev.com right now. Well, we have done many updates and architecture re-factors since then but the basic nuts and bolts is still the same from 2 years ago. We have only enhanced it a little here and there to ensure that everything works perfectly and is scalable.

Growth has been good and steady, one that we would find hard to complaint about.

All of this has been because of you and your feedback, and to show our appreciation for it, we are doubling all subscription plan sizes.

In addition to that, we have added a new subscription plan called Pro MSmall (MSmall = Medium Small) that’s between our Pro Small and Pro Medium plans - $10/month for 5GB of space.

This change takes effect immediately, and you can see the change reflected on your account page. I’m sure there will be users who would like to downgrade/upgrade pricing plans due to the new sizes. If you’d like to change subscription plans, please feel free to raise a support ticket and we’ll sort it out for you.

The subscription plans at the moment look like this:

We’ve just done a major upgrade over the past few weeks to the whole of XP-Dev.com. It has been pretty eventful and interesting, a few things broke along the way (sorry about that!), and we’ve made a few things much simpler.

1. New Home Page Design
2. Infrastructure upgrades
   1. Repository URL cleanup
   2. New High Availability System
   3. New SSH fingerprint
3. Trac Hosting Changes
4. New Trac Plugins
5. Minor Bug Fixes and Enhancements

New Home Page Design

The main landing pages for XP-Dev.com has been updated to a new design. The rest of XP-Dev.com will follow suite in the next few weeks, and will give the whole platform a much needed UI improvement.

Infrastructure upgrades

A number of infrastructure related upgrades have been performed. During this migration (which took a bit more than a week), there were intermittent problems on the whole platform while we were making changes and migrating users to new servers. All of this is complete, and we’re now in stable zone, where we can focus on delivering new functionality.

Repository URL cleanup

No more silly subdomains for repositories! In the past, your repository would have existed on svn.xp-dev.com,svn2.xp-dev.com, git.xp-dev.com, git2.xp-dev.com etc. From now on all repositories are addressed from a single domain xp-dev.com, i.e. http(s)://xp-dev.com/.. and ssh://xp-dev.com/..

We’ve done this to simplify our URL structures and helps you out by requiring less typing (and avoid a ton of confusion along the way)!

New High Availability System

The new infrastructure deployed is based on a live-live load-balanced architecture. This ensures that only a minimal amount of users are affected when we do have outages. Additionally, it gives the whole platform additional resilience and allows us to start offering SLAs with some guarantees (stay tuned for more information about this).

On top of the added reliability, it does give us the freedom to scale and move repositories between servers without any action/downtime on users. Imagine if the server that your repository is hosted on goes down, we can switch over to a backup server and you won’t even notice it! At the moment, this failover is still a bit manual, but we’ll be making changes in the future to allow a complete automated hot-backup solution.

New SSH fingerprint

As a consequence of the upgrades, some users would have noticed that our SSH fingerprint has changed. This was an oversight (read: technical “debt”) on our end from our previous system where one server had a different key from others. These upgrades have resulted in all repositories being served from one (highly available) floating virtual IP and only a single SSH key can be served.

Our SSH fingerprint is ca:3f:90:8c:b0:93:c0:bd:00:ad:76:37:fb:8c:65:f4. This is what you will see regardless where your repository is located.

Trac Hosting Changes

In the past all users had a common list of Trac plugins that they could enable on their Trac projects. This has changed such that Free account users have access to a limited number of plugins. Paid account holders (Pro and Enterprise) remain unchanged and have access to ALL plugins.

This is being done because some Trac plugins do need a lot of support and attention: either they are broken and require some additional patches to get working, or their setup is overly complex.

New Trac Plugins

We have added support for 6 new Trac plugins:

• Discussion
• Teamcity
• MasterTickets
• GanttCharts
• Eclipse
• TracHours

At time of writing, we currently support 18 Trac plugins in total. If you’d like us to add other plugins, please do raise a support ticket.

Minor Bug Fixes and Enhancements

• Fix state field for Bugs where the state contains foreign Unicode characters.
• Users can supply a fallback billing address if one is not supplied by Paypal from their Settings page
• Users can add a descriptive name to their list of public keys

A number of new features have been released today:

1. Rally Integration
2. Pivotal Tracker Integration
3. Better Trac Plugin Support
4. Avatars
5. Clean-up of Source Control Page
6. Other Features (smaller, but note worthy)
   1. Force SSL for Project Page Views
   2. Repository Only Projects
   3. Custom Date & Date+Time format

Rally Integration

If you use Rally as your choice of project tracking tool, you can now link your XP-Dev.com Subversion, Git and Mercurial repositories and commits to your Rally projects.

To try this out, just head to your project’s Source Control tab, followed by the Rally sub-tab:

Full details & instructions including screenshots are documented below:

http://docs.xp-dev.com/user-guide/rally.html

Pivotal Tracker Integration

If you use Pivotal Tracker as your choice of project tracking tool, you can link your XP-Dev.com repositories with your stories in Pivotal Tracker.

To enable this, just head over to your project’s Source Control tab, followed by the Pivotal Tracker sub-tab:

Full details & instructions including screenshots are documented below:

http://docs.xp-dev.com/user-guide/pivotal-tracker.html

Better Trac Plugin Support

Previously, all Trac projects hosted here on XP-Dev.com had a static list of plugins installed, and it was near impossible to remove them (except if you raised a support ticket to remove them).

With today’s release, you can pick and choose which plugins go into your Trac installation. You get complete control on which plugins go into your Trac project.

Additionally, four new plugins have been added in: Agilo, Announcer, Never Notify Updater and Breadcrumbs

This brings the total number of plugins enabled on XP-Dev.com to ten:

If you’d like to see your favourite plugin added to the list, just raise a support ticket - adding these plugins are pretty straight forward – this release made it easier to perform these types of additions.

Avatars

XP-Dev.com avatars for users (the picture that pops up next to your username) have always been sourced from Gravatar. With today’s release, you can upload your own avatar directly into your profile.

You can access this from your settings page

Clean-up of Source Control Page

As XP-Dev.com repositories now support eight different external tools/integrations, the main repository page was getting a little bit cluttered.

Each integration option is now separated into tabs:

Other Features (smaller, but note worthy)

Force SSL for Project Page Views

If you’re a paid user, you can ensure that everyone accessing your project does it over SSL i.e. HTTPS. You can set this in your project’s Settings tab:

Repository Only Projects

You can now create lightweight projects that only have repositories and do not have any project/bug tracking enabled. This is useful for teams that do not want the additional clutter in their projects (and may cause some confusion to team members).

The new project type is called Repository Only:

Custom Date & Date+Time format

Each person has their own natural way of reading dates and timestamps. You can now specify your own formatting, which will then be applied to all dates that you see across projects.

This can be accessed from your settings page. To change it, click on Edit Attributes:

Hope you enjoy these new features, and if you have any problems, please do raise a support ticket

The Git User’s Survey 2010 is now up. Please take a short while to answer the questions; it’ll help the Git community understand your needs, and overall help improve it.

The survey would be open from 1 September till 15 October 2010.

A couple of new features worth mentioning have been released:

Managing Your Own Set of Accounts

In the past, whenever you needed to get a someone else (team members, clients, etc) to collaborate or join on your project, you had to create an account for them from the registration page. This is quite a tedious process as it involved logging out from your current account, submitting the registration form, logging out of the newly created account, logging in back to the original account, and finally, sending out an email to the collaborator with the username and password details.

Tedious!

The latest version of XP-Dev.com allows everyone (Free and Paid accounts) to create their own set of users under their account, and on top of it, you can even manage and delete them when they are no longer needed – all of this done while keeping the passwords of the newly created accounts private.

You can access this feature by going to your Manage Users tab from your dashboard.

Full details & instructions including screenshots are documented on the Managing Child Accounts page:

http://docs.xp-dev.com/user-guide/childaccounts.html

Admin Roles

A new permission role has been added to XP-Dev.com: Project Administrators. In a nutshell, project administrators are writers who have additional administrative access, that previously was only granted to the project owner only. Administrators can create/delete repositories, as well as perform any administrative tasks on repositories. Additionally, they can grant/revoke permissions to/from other users on a project.

Full details about the Admin role is documented on our permissions user guide:

http://docs.xp-dev.com/user-guide/permissions.html

Due to some maintenance work that need to be performed, XP-Dev.com will be down from 9am London BST till 12pm London BST on Saturday 25th September 2010.

I will post a notice once the work has been completed.

Update: maintenance was completed around 12.10 pm London BST and all services are back online.