I moved from Visual Source Safe to Subversion. I’ll never go back.
Impressions
I was forever locked into the VSS world, always worrying that if I will have to abandon my comfy Visual Studio integrated tools. My early dabbling in the CVS command line world were fun and while the server was great the clients were faulty at best. The few CVS clients at the time (WinCVS and TortoiseCVS come to mind) were unintuitive and lacking key features. Visual Studio integration was buggy. So back I went into my VSS hole.
Earlier this month I decided to give Subversion a try. Looking around I discovered VisualSVN and in a few minutes I was setup and ready to commit (pun intended). I am really impressed by VisulSVN. For somebody used to VSS this is the deal! You get great integration with Visual Studio 2008, so much so that I don’t miss any of the VSS features I got used to. For more advanced features you get TortoiseSVN for monkeying around the explorer so you can commit files without starting Visual Studio or doing fancier stuff like creating repositories.
I also got the free VisualSVN Server, made specifically for the UI-happy Windows users. No command line configuration happening here, all I need is in a few screens and it is so easy to do I didn’t even read the manual. Not that I ever do that anyway ;),
Price
VisualSVN - $49.
Visual SVN Server - Free
TortoiseSVN – Free
Conclusion
You must have source control software and VisualSVN is well worth the money.
Get VisualSVN and VisualSVN server from here http://www.visualsvn.com/
Get TortoiseSVN from here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
