Versioning… a very good idea.
Published 10.14.2005 by ~mattg
One of my side projects is rapidly becoming a beast. Every time I think I’m getting close to being done, more (billable) features and requests are added to my plate. I’m not complaining, but what little break I thought I would have for the holidays is rapidly dwindling.
As the project is becoming a bit of a beast, I was increasingly worried about changes that would adversely affect the application, and felt the need to implement some version control with this project. Now, as it’s an ASP.NET project, the first thing that comes to mind is Visual SourceSafe (VSS). But that costs money, and it would have to run on my development machine, as I do not have a Windows-based server anywhere. I thought about installing CVS, but remembered hearing about Subversion, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I’m glad I did. Fedora Core 3 has rpm’s for Subversion (not the latest and greatest, but it provides the features that I need), so
and some configuration to the Apache config file did the trick for the server install. As for a client, I found TortoiseSVN, which is essentially a shell add-in that provides all the commands you could want for using Subversion on your windows machine. So that’s it, right?
Nope… Someone took the time to write a Visual Studio .NET Plugin for Subversion: AnkhSVN. It works pretty closely to the native binding (via Visual SourceSafe), although it’s doesn’t have the pending checkins tree. But for free, it’s great.
NOTE: This is by no means an endorsement of SVN over any other versioning tool. It does what I wanted it to do, and I haven’t delved deeply into it’s capabilities for merging and the like. I use VSS at work everyday and it works in that environment. I use Subversion because it provides some pretty good features at a great price (see free) for my small side project development.
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