Anyone that has worked on software development will have come into contact with Source (Code) Control software at some point. I’ve recently been looking for a solution to use at home on my personal projects and I think I’ve found just the thing. TortoiseSVN. Its based on the very well respected SubVersion control platform which is in use in numerous institutions on all manner of projects large and small.
The main problem I found with finding a solution was to find a Desktop based system that provided all I needed, at least the basics of what you would require from version control software. I’ve managed to do that and so much more. TortoiseSVN is about as comprehensive as you would ever want or need. I installed it in minutes and I had all my current in progroess solutions added and managed within half an hour. Brilliant.
I’m actually more used to using Visual SourceSafe at work and frankly that is a really poor excuse for version control software, in fact I’d say that it gets in the way of productivity rather than ensures the smooth working of a team of developers. It’s inconsistent with itself, a nightmare to administer and its merge/branching support is pathetic in all honesty.
Go Tortoise, you’ll never look back (or loose source code) again!
Ive been using subversion at work for years now. Its setup was easy and it just works. SourceSafe screwed me more than once by having its database go nuclear comletely breaking my projects. Ill never ever ever use that dog again.
For sure, we recently had a contractor leave the project to go and work for Microsoft. Naturally the IT department nuked his logon/account and he had left a stack of work checked out of SourceSafe … nightmare ensues. We’ve also had terrible problems with file version synchronisation since many contractors we use will take a copy locally and work on a machine not linked to our SourceSafe database, it just cannot cope with this scenario … it’s madness.
Basically, we are going to switch to a full on Server/Client solution using SubVersion when we have the time.