by Joe Farah
Workspace Management has been an increasingly important component of CM over the years. Gone are the days when the only workspace operations were checkout, checkin, build/make, and the occasional file merge operation. Today, the workspace is at the center of a developer's interaction with the CM tool. Ideally, the workspace is not just a file holder, but embodies an entire development context. More and more that context is accessed through a richer CM tool interface, or from an IDE environment, or even through the file system. So that in the modern CM tool, the workspace must actively provide guidance to the developer rather than lying dormant waiting for a developer to manage it.