I am searching for a tool which provides the following features for developing ASP.NET web application using Visual Studio 2012:
Version-control,
Bug-tracking,
Source-control,
Multiple users working and accessing the same project at the same time,
Integration with Visual Studio 2012.
All of the above features come with TFS, but in my case we have a small development team (less than 5) and I was thinking that free tools such as SVN might be more cost effective comparing to TFS which might be more suitable for large teams.
Q1) So can anyone advice if Apache Subversion SVN will be able to achieve the above 5 main features?
Q2) Second question, if I go with SVN rather than TFS what are the features I am going to miss or can not achieve in SVN?
Apache Subversion can be your best friend but I want to quote this answer:
One can not compare between TFS and SVN!
Points 1 and 3: definitely yes.
Point 2: you can integrate SVN with a bug-tracker, even with client-side bells and whistles. E.g. check TortoiseSVN client Manual: "Integration with Bug Tracking Systems / Issue Trackers".
Point 4: definitely yes.
Point 5: yes. Check VisualSVN extension for Visual Studio. You can use it for free if your machines are not in a domain.
As for Apache Subversion server you may want to look at VisualSVN Server Standard Edition which is also free. It would be the best choice for Windows environment, in fact.
As far as i know you can achieve the point 1,3,4,5. With Point 2 i'm not sure.
But you can take a look at this
Related
Is there a fairly inexpensive source control product on the market that integrates into Visual Studio 2008+ and that has the power and capabilities of Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server?
I have used Dynamsoft, SourceGear, Subversion and Platic SCM and reckon that neither of these products can come close to Team Foundation Server.
Ideally I would be interested in a product that:
handles conflict resolution well
handles IDE edits, renames and deletes automatically
easy project management within the source control "server" that allows a project administrator to painlessly manipulate the project structure as they see fit.
Subversion with Tortoise SVN
Here is an article by Rick Strahl on setting everything up.
I used svn at my last job, and tfs at my current one. I can't say I really like having to deal with tfs on a day to day basis.
SubVersion and AnkhSVN will integrate directly into Visual Studio.
Visual SVN is a tool to integrate SVN directly with Visual Studio.
(source: visualsvn.com)
It costs $49 per license.
They have a demo so you can see if it what you are looking for.
Actually, I've recently started using Team Foundation at work. Some of it is nice, but our team has spent at least 10 hours in total last week to fix silly TFS problems that never should have occurred in the first place.
While it isn't perfect, I find Subversion superior in many ways when it comes to plain source control. Get TortoiseSVN and shell out 50 bucks for VisualSVN if you want an integrated solution.
Personally I much prefer SourceGear Vault to SVN.
But it's hard to argue with free, and Vault is pretty expensive if you have more than 2 users.
Try visualsvn.
EDIT
Use VisualSvn as server (my bad, should have clarified I meant that), and as for the client, I used AnkhSVN, which got quite good over time.
From what I hear, VisualHg is a good Visual Studio addin for the Mercurial distributed source-control system. You just need to install TortoiseHg and then VisualHg, and you'll be up and running.
Well, you could use SVN in conjunction with bug tracking solutions such as Trac. There is a Trac Visual Studio plugin. There is also Redmine, though I don't know about its VS plugins.
If all you do is to "view, compare, attach changesets to work items and annotate", I guess bug tracking solutions are quite good.
What features of Team Foundation in particular are you interested in?
If you're just interested in Source Code Control, there are many plugins available for various other products. Subversion for instance has several plugins available which give a very similar experience to the Team Foundation plugin. AnkSVN is my personal favorite.
http://help.collab.net/topic/com.collabnet.anksvn.doc/concepts/ankh_whatis.html
We're going with Git but it probably doesn't have the integration with VS2008 you'd want.
Git manual: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html
Mike,
If you are just looking for source control, the answer is yes.
If you are looking for an inexpensive replacement for everything that TFS does (build, test, project management, etc.) the answer is heck, no.
We've been using Visual Source Safe 6.0d for quite some time now, and it has served us well. However, upon attempting to upgrade to SourceSafe 2005, we discovered that it costs an arm and a leg! Additionally, it does not appear to be a painless upgrade. That said, we want a different solution that costs less money (preferrably free). As long as it has Visual Studio integration, it will work for us.
I've heard that SubVersion with the VisualSVN plugin is a good alternative. Anybody made this switch before? If so, how painful was it?
EDIT: We have a small group of developers, less than 10. We don't need to have source control over the web, it will just be internal.
I'm a big fan of VisualSVN Server + AnkhSVN VS Integration. It's an easy and free setup and so far has been very painless. TortoiseSVN as a shell integration is an awesome compliment and well I don't know if you could do without.
I have used SVN for quite some time now and loves it's tight integration with CruiseControl.net regarding automated builds. I had used Tortoise for so long that I was quite comfortable with it's explorer plugins. However, many of my team members couldn't quite grasp Tortoise and complained constantly. Then we purchased VisualSVN and got them plugged in on that. All the pain went away and they were quite happy after that.
WAY BETTER THAN SourceSafe.
Our shop tried SVN quite a while ago, but after the bugginess we had with it (constantly updating tortoiseSVN, lack of good branching, and some other issues), we started to evaluate other options.
We finally settled on http://www.plasticscm.com/ PlasticSCM, it has some features of git/mercurial as far as really flexible branching and merging goes, and it integrates flawlessly with Visual Studio. Even some of our team members who had only used SourceSafe had no problems with it, as opposed to SVN.
We too were long-time users of Visual SourceSafe 6, and made the switch about 6 months ago to VisualSVN / TortoiseSVN, and we've never looked back. The extra productivity and flexibility its given our team of 4 developers is massive.
There is some getting used to the concepts of branching and merging, but nothing that isn't covered in the Subversion documentation.
I've found that I often use the TortoiseSVN Windows Explorer integration for most tasks like updating and committing, but VisualSVN is nicely integrated with the IDE and worth the money.
VisualSVN also costs (50$ per seat iirc), you can use AnkhSVN which is free alongside VisualSVN server.
There are quite a few scripts people have written to migrate sourcesafe repo's into svn that retain history etc.
It is well worth the move.
If you want a XXI century tool for version control, maybe mercurial is the one for you, you'll have a distributed version control and you'll be able to choose among many options for the development and release cycle. You can install tortoisehg. The integration with Visual Studio can be done via visualhg. I blogged about that a time ago, I'm not able to put many links here yet, sorry.
With Mercurial you'll be able to use even outside your lan, there are plenty of options for publication and a central repository, or as I mentioned earlier, you can choose among many other aproximations for your source control.
Have you considered SourceGear Vault?
It will be a painless transition from VSS. They have a VSS plugin for Visual Studio, as well as a standalone client.
The SourceGear Vault pricing page will let you calculate license prices. For 10 users, it's averaging about $240 USD each.
I'm begining the development of a personal Web Application project. I'd like to have a source control system for that project.
At work, we user Team Foundation Server and I'm quite happy with that, mostly for the Visual Studio integration.
I'd like to know if there was free source control solutions that had the same kind of integration with VS2008.
I just started using Subversion actually, all I did was go to their website and download the server (took like 10 mins to install and setup). The installer asks you where you want your code repository to be and then it sets up the server completely. The only thing I had to do was put in a password file. I installed ankhsvn (which is an SVN client that integrates into Visual Studio) and it worked perfectly, without a hitch. Exactly how you'd expect. It's very little work overall.
subversion, mercurial
I think you have two options, really:
Subversion. It's easy to setup etc, and free. I like VisualSVN, which is $50, and worth atleast 5x that much, but you can use Ankh (free, OSS) or just use tortose (windows explorer plugin, OSS, free).
Once you have tortoseSVN (VisualSVN needs it too) you can make local repo's, or use a remote one, eg VisualSVNServer (also free), or personally, I have mine hosted with my websites at dreamhost :)
Another option is SourceGear Vault. It's GREAT if you have a windows-based server somewhere (it's SQL 200x + ASP.NET based, including SQL Express Edition I think), and it's free for one user. Very good if you are used to SourceSafe or TFS, and it can work in the SVN/CVS checkout-merge-commit way if you want to (not the default, but easy to change), or just use the check out - lock - check in way like VSS.
You might have heard Eric Sink of SourceGear on the Stack OVerflow podcast the other week - same company.
50 Bucks gets you all the subversion control you could need.
EDIT: And in the long run...50 bucks is as good as free...
I found Subversion very easy to install. AnkhSVN integrates into the Visual Studio IDE nicely and makes sure you don't forget to add new files created in the IDE to SVN. However, AnkhSVN also seems to have it's periodic hiccups.
TortoiseSVN seemed more stable when I used it, plus it has some advanced features (like a nice conflict editor) that Ankh is still lacking. That's why I use both Ankh and SVN for the best of both worlds.
visualsvn + ankhsvn works great for me
I have had good experiences with TortoiseSVN although it does not integrate directly into Visual Studio. It is free and integrates into Windows quite well.
If you want a solution that has more integration I would recommend Vault from SourceGear. It is free for individual users and is easy to setup. It has more features than SVN and direct access from within VS.
Subversion is good, but not that easy to install (since it requires Apatche). Take a look at Vault very simple to install, and works very well with Visual Studio. It's also free for single developer.
I'd like to increase developers' "comfort level" in our team a bit.
We are using Visual Studio 2008 and TortoiseCVS + WinCVS, but no integration as of yet.
In your CVS/Visual Studio experience, what is the best integration tool in terms of "supports basic CVS functionality add/diff/update/commit/annotate/etc", "works out of the box", almost "bug-free"?
a) commercial
b) free or open source
Edit:
There are 2 commercial MSSCCI bridge solutions I've found so far: PushOk.com and TamTam (daveswebsite.com). Both were developed quite a long time ago and now have only minor updates. Being MSSCCI bridges, they are somewhat limited in functionality and can not provide all the nice features of vsPackage SCC provider, but are probably better than nothing.
You might be stuck with one of those MSSCCI bridges you mentioned. As it is, not too many people still use CVS, especially those using Visual Studio (most of them seem to use Team System's revision control, or Subversion).
There's always the possibility of hacking together your own macros to take care of CVS operations, but this has the disadvantage of not giving you real, in-depth integration the way a an SCC provider, or even an old brige, would.
I don't know about CVS, but if going to SVN is an option, there's always Ankh.
Ankh is a open source choice
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/
Why isn't there a Team Foundation Server Express Edition?
Almost 3 years and 16 answers later,TFS Express is now a fact.
The Express Editions are specifically designed for individuals who do not have access or, more bluntly, cannot afford the full versions of Visual Studio but who would like to develop in the .NET Framework.
Team Foundation Server on the other hand, is specifically designed for corporations which has software development teams with a number of members. Corporations (nor startups) have never been the target of the Express product.
You can still take advantage of Express editions and collaborative tools by using open source products in conjunction with them, e.g., use Subversion for source control, Cruise Control for continuous integration, etc. They will give you most of what you need and still allow you to use the Express editions in a team environment.
I am not sure, however, if specifically using Express editions in a team environment is a violation of its EULA. Hope not :P
There is an Express version of TFS coming out with Visual Studio 2012:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/02/23/coming-soon-tfs-express.aspx
Because Microsoft is positioning TFS to compete with software like ClearCase, releasing a free edition would undermine that positioning.
If you're looking for the source-control a bug-tracking functionality that TFS provides, there are a number of free products out there that can do it for you like CVS or Subversion if you want something open source. TFS is meant to be used by very large teams, addressing the kinds of problems you have with very large teams - using it for just source control is total overkill.
I prefer Sourcegear's products (they're free for single developers) - Vault if you're just looking for source control, and Vault Professional (previously called "Fortress") if you want source control along with bug and work item tracking, which covers most of TFS's functionality.
Well, it's an interesting question, but the real question is what the usage scenario for such a thing would be?
In particular, I see TFS as focusing heavily on supporting dev teams. (Whether it does a good job of that or not, it's a different matter). Certainly individual developers could benefit from things like the source control facilities in TFS, but it's not clear how a single individual would take advantage of a lot of the functionality in TFS.
And, for pure source control, there are already good alternatives for that already on the market (the way I see it)
Also, it's interesting to note that TFS has some substantial hardware, software and environment requirements that I'm not sure would make it easy for a single individual to host; unless he can spare one machine just to run it (some people do it; I find it a waste of a good machine, myself :)).
And for small teams, there's already TFS WorkGroup Edition, which I guess is as close as MS is going to get to TFS express.
And individuals shouldn't be using TFS?? That's like saying source control is only for groups and not individuals.
If they had an express edition of TFS, then they'd probably get more people using it and paying for their company to use it.
I guess you could say that there is an Express version! Codeplex! Just like the express editions of Visual Studio have certain limitations, you can use Codeplex for free, but you must develop open source.
Doesn't the TFS workgroup edition somewhat fill this 'express' role? 5 users or less and the price is very 'express' when compared to the full 800 pound gorilla.
IBM have a similar product to TFS, Rational Team Concert, and its available for free for a small number of users.
At last Express edition of Team Foundation Server is also available. Check it out here.
No, from memory anything Team Foundation based costs a few times more than the professional versions. That's where Microsoft really makes its money.
The most straightforward answer is that TFS doesn't scale DOWN well enough for it to be worthwhile. TFS is very much aimed at development teams of medium, large, and huge sizes, it's not designed well for very small teams.
Also, on the small scale there are already pretty high quality free, or inexpensive, source control systems available, so it doesn't make much sense for MS to put effort into competing in that area.
I would suggest using SVN with the VisualSVN plug-in if you require source control, which everyone does, on the cheap.
Look at it this way, Visual Studio 2008 Standard is a $250 product. How much of that functionality exists in, say, Visual C# 2008 Express? At least the equivalent of $25 worth? Most likely. At least $10 easily. VSTS 2008 Team Foundation Server is a $2500 product. If they did the same amount of feature reduction to make a TFS Express edition it would be worth $250, which is a bit much to give away for free. More so, a lot of the value of TFS is in its scalability and core feature-set, which is almost impossible to strip away to create a simplified, cheaper product.
I think the reason that Microsoft doesn't have a SQL Server Express version of TFS is because TFS includes SSAS under the covers. I doubt there will ever be an "express" version of SSAS.
Here is the link to download the TFS Express Edition Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads#tfs-express