Visual Studio 2008 source control for small teams

Question

I work on a small web team where I am the only .NET developer currently using Visual Studio 2008 Professional to build and maintain a few web applications. I am about to start training another member of our team so we purchased him a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. I've looked into Visual Source Safe, but I'm dubious. I don't like that is file system based. Ideally, the system would work with SQL Server 2005 and plug into Visual Studio. Windows based solutions are the best because of the IT environment of the organization I work for.

What are my options for a source control system?

(Forgive me if the answer exists in another thread.)

Answer 1

Has any body given Git any thought? There is a very usable solution for windows called GitExtensions here. It integrates with Visual Studio Professional trough an extra menu and optional toolbar. Unlike Subversion, Git is distributed, which means you can commit locally to your copy of the repository, and afterwards push the changes to the server. The bottom line? Git is FAST! It's storage is also more efficient than subversion, which means your repository takes up less space.

Answer 2

Subversion has good integration with Visual Studio 2008 through VisualSVN and Ankh.

SourceSafe is dangerous. You're right that a filesharing-based SCM is a bad idea, and Microsoft themselves have downplayed it and replaced it with a new SCM that comes with the Team edition of Visual Studio.

Answer 3

Definitely, as most people says, Subversion + VisualSVN.

VisualSVN is a fairly cheap addon at $49, subversion is free and very stable. We use that for teams of 10-15 people and it works really well for us. The only con is that it is file-system based.

On the other hand, if you have a very specific need for it not to be on the file system i would NOT recommend Visual Source Safe, on my last job we had a lot of trouble with it and lost precious days of work. If you want to go that way get something like sourcegear vault which is database based. There is also Team Foundation Server from Microsoft but I believe it is really expensive (and heavy) for small teams.

Answer 4

Visual Source Safe has a bad rap from it's earlier incarnations. They came out with a new version in 2005, and it solves many of the problems of earlier versions. I don't think they've solved the branching problems though. They have a client/server portion now (well, it's http based) so that solves some of the remote issues.

SVN is probably a better solution, but VSS isn't as bad as it once was.

Answer 5

I can't believe nobody has mentioned SourceGear Vault. It stores your code in SQL Server, integrates extremely well into VS, and is an excellent replacement/alternative to Source Safe. Since their single-user license is free, I even use it when coding at home. Plus, it's the company founded/run by Eric Sink.

Answer 6

Team Foundation Server does satisfy your requirements of working with SQL Server, but is probably overkill for such a small development team.

I would recommend using Subversion (free) for source control along with VisualSVN ($49) for the visual studio integration. There is also an excellent Subversion client for windows explorer called TortoiseSVN, which is awesome.

The nice thing about giving something like Subversion a try is that it is free and very easy to set up. It will also scale up to a pretty large team. It is worth a shot before investing effort in MSFTs Team Foundation Server.

Answer 7

I recommend subversion, coupled with AnkhSVN, a plugin (Free!) that integrates Subversion with the Visual Studio IDE.

If you use the svnserve distribution that's free from CollabNet (Windows binaries: here), setup is very simple. Administration is very easy. And the product works very well.

It is still file-system based, but that isn't really a problem. Make sure that you back-up regularly, both full dumps and hot-copies (both of which are explained in detail in the documentation).

Answer 8

Visual SVN might work for you, it is supposed to integrate well and is relatively cheap at ~$50 per license. I've been considering buying it myself, so far I just use Tortoise SVN as I do relatively little non-Eclipse work right now.

Answer 9

We switched over from SourceSafe to tfs recently and have found it to work quite capably.

The only notable exception in features we exercised is file linking.

To keep the costs down, we make sure that we get the Gold Certified Partner status.

Answer 10

Subversion. Free. Visual SVN is a great add on, and is fairly inexpensive.

Answer 11

Why not use a SVN server? That way, all your developers can use it, and there is a very good free Windows Client for it (TortoiseSVN). You can integrate SVN support with TortoiseSVN into Visual Studio with VisualSVN, which is commercial, but not actually expensive.

Answer 12

Microsoft's Team Foundation Server integrates fully into VS2008 and uses SQL Server for its back end. The downside is that it's a very expensive solution.