It’s no secret that I have been contact almost daily by Technical Recruiters , often the job advertisements that the technical recruiters have been sending me include a requirement for Microsoft SourceSafe experience. I often wonder a company would choose SourceSafe to manage their code as it doesn’t really do a good job: the only go thing I guess is the integration with Visual Studio TFS.
The company I currently work for didn’t have any sort of source code management when I started. Literally, I had a budget of zero to string together something that was flexible enough and could integrate with Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio 2005. I was able to find something that perfectly fit my needs, cost nothing other than a few hours to implement and about 1/2 an hour of research.
For the Windows server, I needed something that was mostly graphical because the other programmer basically has a fear of the change so I know he won’t be using any of the SVN commands. I also really wanted something that would use Active Directory for authentication if possiblex, because I absolutely hate having to remember yet another password that should be changed in three months. (If it uses Active Directory, I can do a Single Sign on which I believe is absolutely fantastic!) I chose to use VisualSVN Server Standard Edition because of the fairly simple graphical user interface, and Active Directory support. The only thing I’m a little disappointed about is that I have to Remote Desktop into the machine to do some remote tasks.
For the developer machines, I wanted to also have at least one graphical version for subversion. I chose to use TortoiseSVN which is absolutely fantastic and supports all of the SVN protocols that I know and also integrates very well with Windows Explorer even showing what files you have changed since you last commited!
For Visual Studio 6, I was able to use SVNVB6 which works okay but isn’t really ideal. It doesn’t really comply with any of the Microsoft Best Practices for plugins, some things aren’t really fully integrated and the project has really strange scheduled downtime each week.
For Visual Studio 2005, I wanted to be able to right click on any of the files or the project and of course be able to commit my changes. For Visual Studio 2003 + there are quite a few options, I ended up using VsTortoise but Anksvn is also a very good solution.
What Source Code Management system and plugins do you use?
