Custom themes and source control
After reading Breaking Themes in 2008.5 upgrade by Chris Shawn, I had an epiphany when I started to think about how I had setup the CS SDK in my TFS store. You will be able to do this with any of the major commercial source control applications (i.e. TFS, ClearCase, CVS, etc), it won't work with VSS, and I'm not sure about SVN as it is the most screwy source control application that I have ever used.
In TFS I have a CS SDK root branch, a base branch which incorporates additions/changes that I have made to the SDK that is a direct branch from the root, and then a separate branch for each individual site that is branched from the base branch. The epiphany that occurred to me is that you can have branches within branches and even change the name of the folder that is being branched.
The last release of CS contains only one theme, Hawaii. If I were to create a branch of the Hawaii theme folder from the base branch to one of the site branches with a different name (i.e. MyTheme), then that site would contain 2 copies of the Hawaii theme named Hawaii and MyTheme. I could then customize MyTheme to meet my needs. The next time that the Hawaii theme is updated I could propagate the changes down the merge tree to MyTheme and merge them in, which would save me a hell of a lot of time.
Using the merge capabilities of a well written source control application is a million times easier than using WinDiff, WinMerge or Beyond Compare to make these changes. I can't believe that I had never considered this before, but if it wasn't for Chris Shawn's post, it may have taken me even longer.
P.S. I know that this is going to put a HUGE smile on Dave Burke's face, but only after he hits himself in the head a few times. 