I'm looking for a source control system that I can use for personal projects. I have two laptops and a desktop I develop on and a flash drive for portability. Rather than keeping all my code on my flash drive I want to check it out / in on the machine I'm working on at the time.
I'm specifically looking for something file based that integrates with VS2010, not an internet / network / server based source control system.
I was hoping for something free, but could afford something reasonably cheap.
Any thoughts?
Regards
Tristan
Have you looked at GIT?
It is a distributed SCM, meaning there is no server.
As for using it with visual studio - see this SO question and answers.
VisualSVN seems to have support for Visual Studio 2010 and is a breeze to use. As far as SVN itself goes, it does not need a server to operate: it can work off USB drive just fine.
Remember to back your flash drive, though.
Well, you're looking for Plastic SCM Community Edition.
It is totally integrated with Visual Studio
Shell Extension too (like TortoiseSVN and so on)
Check the branch per task cycle
Diff and merge tools with refactor support
So definitely something to look at.
Related
We are in the midst of transitioning from asp, vbscript, SQL Server 2000, to asp.net mvc, sql server 2008.
When we were using classic asp, we could use Dreamweaver to lock access to a file on the network so that developers and designers wouldn't overwrite each other's changes when saving.
Is there an equivalent feature in Visual Studio 2010? Or, are there other techniques to accomplish this?
There most definitely are techniques to accomplish this.
Based on the upgrade, it sounds like the team is moving forward. Maybe that means business is good, maybe that means the team is growing or will grow, etc. In any event, and even if it's just a single developer, file locking to prevent overwriting each other's changes is no solution at all. Proper source control should always be used.
Visual Studio has support for TFS, naturally, but there are plugins for other (free) systems. SVN is a good one to get started. (Though, personally, I don't like IDE integration of source control. I prefer to see it as a file operation and not a code operation, and therefore prefer the Tortoise revision control clients for their Windows Explorer integration.)
You will almost certainly want to transition to a proper version control system.
Subversion is very popular and works well for most. TortoiseSVN is an extremely useful Explorer extension to make Subversion easy to use. There are also plugins for development environments. VisualSVN (not free) and AnkhSVN both integrate Subversion into Visual Studio.
Git & Mercurial are also very popular. Both are designed with distributed teams more in mind. They work largely the same as Subversion, but each version control system has slightly different "best practices" when it comes to work flow, particularly around branching and merging.
#quakkels: Go for TFS. I deeply hate it, but it will be easier for you.
SVN is for geeks, and GIT is for alpha-geeks (or for wanabes like me).
I want to share the same Visual Studio 2010 project with my team where my team can work on the same project at the same time, anywhere, anytime.
I know TFS can do it,but I don't want to use it because we can't afford the license fee,can you please suggest another way which is simpler....
Please do reply.
Thank you.
The category of tool you're looking for is called, alternatively, "Version Control", "Version Management", or "Revision Control". This software forms a critical part of a larger discipline called "Software Configuration Management".
For us, we use the Subversion system. It's got excellent Windows support (and integrates nicely with Visual Studio with ankhsvn. It's all free, of course.
Other popular systems include git and Mercurial. There are many, many others.
I recommend looking into Subversion. This way you can save your code. It isn't dependent on Visual Studio easy to expand/change/etc. Also if two or more people are working on the same project then the program can merge the files or show the conflicts.
You might want to read a little more about version control. I must suggest these great posts:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/250984/do-i-really-need-version-control
What is the difference between all the different types of version control?
I'd use TortoiseSVN, it's a subversion client that allows you to do exactly what you want to.
TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use
Revision control / version control /
source control software for Windows.
Since it's not an integration for a
specific IDE you can use it with
whatever development tools you like.
TortoiseSVN is free to use. You don't
need to get a loan or pay a full years
salary to use it.
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.
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 am developing an Isolated Shell that caters to "designers/special content creators" performing specific tasks, using the Shell. As they operate on files, they need to be able to use TFS for source control. This is mainly due to the fact that Developers will also operate on the same files from TFS but using Visual studio 2008.
After looking and searching I still could not find Team Explorer to be available to Shell.
Asking on MSDN forums, lead me to the answer that "this is not supported yet in the Isolated Shell". Well, then the whole point of giving away a shell is not justified, if you want to use a source control system for your files. The idea is not to recreate everything and develop tool windows etc using the TFS provider API.
The Visual Studio Extensibility book by Keyven Nayyeri has an example, which only goes so far into this problem of adding a sc provider.
Has anyone worked on developing Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell applications/environment? Please provide comments, questions - anything that you have to share apart from the following threads, which I've already participated in.
Threads from MSDN forums:
Team Explorer for Isolated Shell
Is it possible to use Team Explorer in VS Shell Isolated?
Thanks for your answer. Yes you are right, we will acquire CALs for users without having to buy them Visual Studio, that's the direction we will be taking.
But I am yet to figure out how to make Team Explorer available to such users, inside Shell. So I am looking to find out the technical details of how that can be done.
I mean, I have a user, he installs my VS Shell application, he has no VStudio Team system on his machine. Now if I acquire CAL for TFS and install Team Explorer, do you think it will be automatically available in the VS Shell app?
Any ideas? have you worked on making this happen?
Thanks
It sounds like you are trying to allow the "special content creators" save files in TFS Source Control without having to buy them a license to a Visual Studio Team Edition -- correct me if I'm wrong.
If that's the case, unfortunately I believe that you can't quite do that. Your users still need a Client Access License ("CAL") to access TFS.
I think that you can acquire just CALs for your users without having to buy Visual Studio for them (I presume for less than a full blown Visual Studio would cost). At that point, you can just distribute to them the Team Explorer, which is a VS shell with nothing but TFS access components. That is available in your TFS server media.
I found this via Google. You might want to review it to decide your best options:
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper
The only exception to the CAL rules I'm aware of is access to Work Items. Assuming properly licensed servers, anyone in your organization can create new Work Items or view and update existing ones created by them, using the Work Item Web Access component.
Just stumbled on this question, it might still be relevant to you.
You have the option of including the AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) packages and load it into your Isolated Shell. While there are some issues around it, with Subversion support, you could use SvnBridge to access TFS repositories. This might bring you a little bit closer to the process you are trying to achieve.