Source Control for a .Net guy

Question

See VSS or SVN for a .Net Project?, among many other similar questions.

There are a lot of options out there for ASP.Net Developers, some are total garbage and some are feature rich and pricey.

I've been using Visual Source Safe 2005 for a while when doing personal development, but only on my personal projects. It has issues, let me say.

The worst issue is that it doesn't seem to be able to handle ASP.Net Web Sites. Most things are never checked out on edit regardless of how you set it up and I usually have to Get Latest and say "Keep local changes and Check Out" to get that functionality.

Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone could help me move away from this monster to something more stable. Team Foundation Server is obviously overkill. SourceVault is reliable, but kinda pricey. SVN is free, but all of the plugins that most other source control providers give you make it cost "something" when it's all said and done.

I was just wondering what everyone is using and if they can suggest a better way to go.

Answer 1

I recently moved my team off SourceSafe to Subversion using three free tools:

1. VisualSVN Server - Subversion server package for Windows
2. TortoiseSVN - Explorer shell extension
3. AnkhSVN - Visual Studio plugin

You'll also want to reference the Subversion book.

This was easy to set up and has been a tremendous success. SourceSafe is a disaster -- the final straw for me was when I had to merge a feature branch and discovered that the functionality really doesn't exist in any usable form.

I prefer to use TortoiseSVN for complex operations such as adding solutions to svn, branching, and merging. I use AnhkSVN for updates, commits, and reverts.

Be aware that the latest versions of these tools are currently built against different versions of Subversion. VisualSVN and AnkhSVN are built against 1.5.5 but TortoiseSVN is built against 1.6. You can either grab the previous version of TortoiseSVN or use a daily build of AnkhSVN.

Answer 2

I suggest to take a closer look at SVN. We made the move from SourceSafe to SVN about 18 months ago, and I would never want to go back (we're mostly doing ASP.NET stuff).

Especially, when working in a team, the edit-merge-commit model makes it so much easier than SourceSafe's Lock-Edit-Unlock model. Also handling branches is much easier with subversion.

Regarding the plug-ins, I can say the following: I'm mainly using TortoiseSVN (free) which is nicely integrated into the windows explorer. I do not really miss a plug-in that is integrated into Visual Studio.

Out of curiosity, I installed AnkSVN (free), which gives you an integrated solution (in VS). I have to say, it works very well, but most of the time, I still use TortoiseSVN.

Answer 3

You write .NET guy... if you are just a single user, SourceGear Vault is free. After that it runs about $250 / user with support. Either way, I have been using Vault for years. Simple, works well and coming from Source Safe, the interface will be similar.

www.sourcegear.com

At home, I use the free, single user edition. At work, we have licensed about 60 users.