I occasionally need to edit source on the road and have a workspace with about 30 projects in it. I use NT and/or W98 and either of two NT Perforce servers.

When I open this workspace detached from the network, there is first a delay of about a minute while it times out on the server connection. Then I need to click OK on two dialogs per project- the first saying it cannot connect to the server, and the second asking whether I want to connect to the server for future sessions (I've never experimented with answering "No" to this one :-). The whole process is boring enough that I generally don't bother unless I'm in the field and need to address a serious problem.

Ignoring the problem of using p4 diff to do the re-syncing later, which I find is well covered in the FAQ, are there any ideas on how to streamline startup in the absence of a server?

A simple On/Off switch, either in VC++ or Perforce, would be perfect. For instance, could I configure a different "dummy" server or client that maps the depot to a different directory?

http://www.zocalo.net/~mgr