Perforce in a Microsoft Shop

Question

Our dev shop currently uses Visual SourceSafe. We all know how that could end up (badly), so we're investigating other systems. First up is Perforce. Does anyone have experience with using it and its integration into Visual Studio (2003/2005/2008)? Is it as good as any other, or is it pretty solid with good features, comparatively?

Answer 1

I used Perforce at my last 3 jobs (my current job I'm using Subversion, which I don't like nearly as much.) I'm a big fan of Perforce, and moving from SourceSafe it will seem like Nirvana. Just getting atomic checkin will be a big boost for your company. Otherwise, Perforce is fast, it has good tools, and the workflow is simple for doing things like merges and integrations. I wholeheartedly recommend it. It may not be all new and flashy like the latest distributed VCS's, but honestly, I prefer the client/server model for its speed, especially if you're working with people in other countries that may have slow connections to you.

The Visual Studio integration is pretty good, but it has a few irritating issues. If you run another Perforce client at the same time (like P4V), it's very poor at keeping changes from the other client in sync in terms of showing what files are currently checked in/out. You generally have to shut down Visual Studio and load the project again if you want it to sync correctly. But, the sync status doesn't actually affect checkins/checkouts/updates from working correctly, it just means you can be fooled in to thinking something is in a different state than it actually is while you're in Visual Studio. The Perforce clients will always show the correct status as they sync continually with the database.

Also, on occasion you'll find you need to work "offline" (not connected to the Perforce database for some reason) and when you load the project again the next time, your Perforce bindings may be lost and you'll have to rebind each project individually. If you work with a solution that contains many projects this can be a big pain in the patoot. Same goes for when you first check out a solution, binding to Perforce is needed before the integration occurs.