Source Control
Nicolas Galler | November 22, 2006I have been evaluating source control solutions for Visual Studio 2005 this last week. I went through the exercise of setting up VSS 2005. What a pain that was. First of all SourceSafe is slow. Very slow. It is not just slow when accessing data through a slow connection (which is really near impossible – it seems to refresh a lot of data every time you click on a file so it takes forever), or when checking out a large number of files. Everything is just painfully slow, even just browsing the repository on a local link. In addition the VSS integration is terrible. Admittedly I stumbled a bit when designing the repository layout and had to rename some folders. The problem is the path information is embedded in so many places in the VS project file it was almost impossible to get it out – I ended up having to recreate the solution files from scratch (wasn’t a big deal in this case but this shows how much of a royal pain this could be to manage). Also the whole lock/modify/commit process is very hard to get used to… basically VS will tend to automatically check out some files like the project file and then screw me if I try to modify the project on another machine and forgot to check it in.
Anyway out of despair I decided to give a try to subversion, although I really would have liked to stick with a Microsoft technology for once. This little guy is lightning fast, and absolutely not picky about what you do to the file. I installed the TortoiseSVN interface to manipulate the repository and I love it. Main thing missing right now is integration with Visual Studio. Also so far I have not had to deal with merges so I don’t know how good it is at that but I don’t think it can be as bad as VSS. I might install the AnkhSVN plugin to see how well that work – but I will just skip on the integration for now so I can get some work done!
I think you will find VisualSVN interesting. It provides Subversion integration for Visual Studio and uses TortoiseSVN for most of the UI.
Well I still haven’t tried VisualSVN. I did give a try to Ankh, and it was almost nice, but in my opinion it tries to do too much. All I really want is an indication of whether my files are committed or not, and a way to add them through the UI – I don’t want them to be renamed automatically, or added automatically, or in fact anything automatic. Ankh actually managed to mark a couple entire folders for deletion – needless to say I wasn’t too happy with that. But I did find out that it works pretty well when you disable the automatically adding of files.
I use to love subversion, but then a year ago my company switched everything over to AccuRev, a source control tool that’s known for managing the development process. I’m sure it wasn’t cheap, but it works a lot better for our large development team. The only problem was that were weren’t able to transfer our history in SVN to AccuRev, but our performance and release quality has really improved, and AccuRev requires a lot less administration than than and Subversion did. But I still use subversion for my own small projects at home.