How do programmers collaborate their code and work without using TFS?

Question

I am looking for a simple way to collaborate between a team of programmers developing with C# ASP.NET using Visual Studio 2010. I currently use TFS at my other job, and its easy enough so I can download the current files and check them out or check them in etc. Is there a free tool out there that provides the same functionality or are there easy methods out there to have a team of developers work on the same set of code easily without having to buy TFS?

Answer 1

Gforge. It has two licenses. Advanced Server & Community Edition.

It has source control, issue and task tracking, wiki, and the Advanced Serve has a Visual Studio and MS Office plugin.

Complete feature list: http://gforgegroup.com/es/express-as-differences.pdf

Download: http://gforgegroup.com/es/download.php

Answer 2

Have you heard of Tortoise SVN?

Answer 3

Collabnet (makers of Subversion) have a neat plugin for Visual Studio called AnkhSVN, so it will feel similar to TFS.

If you and your other developers want an integration environment that links with Subversion (I strongly recommend you have this if you don't already), you can use any CI tool: CruiseControl.NET, Team City, Jenkins, or BuildMaster (of which I am a developer).

Answer 4

There are lots of different source control systems available. I don't believe any one of them is as much of a "one stop shop" as TFS in terms of its other offerings (tracking work items, document sharing, automated deployments, etc.) but some of them are considered to be much more of a "best of breed" option for just source control when compared with TFS.

Many people use TFS because of this "one stop shop" mentality where everything is integrated into one complete package. Many others prefer to string together various best of breed tools to customize their own approach. For example, we use TFS at my current job, but at a previous job we used a combination of SVN (for source control), TeamCity (for continuous integration), Rake scripts (for builds/deployments) and Rally (for work item tracking).

If I were to recommend a source control solution right now, I'd be torn between Git (with GitHub being an option) and SVN depending on your needs. You might also want to look into Mercurial with the possibility of evolving into using Kiln as the team grows and matures and looks for a commercial tool.

Answer 5

git - with Git Extensions

subversion - with Visual Studio plugin

Answer 6

You might want to try Git.

If the command line isn't your thing, you can use Git Extensions. It comes with a visual studio plugin.

Alternatively, you can use TortoiseGit.

Answer 7

I believe the closest to TFS, and the one I use at work is Subversion:

http://subversion.apache.org/

There is also a Windows Explorer plugin called TortoiseSVN:

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

And a VS plugin, though last time I tried this it was nowhere near as usable as TortoiseSVN (though this was a few years ago):

http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/