Version Control for Visual Studio - NOT Visual SourceSafe

[Fortinbra]

Anyone have any recommendations for a source or version control software for team development that isn't visual source safe(my boss hates it with passion). We're currently looking into Team Foundation Server 2010, I know it's the replacement for VSS, but my boss doesn't know that, yet... Any other recommendations that are compatible with ASP.NET and Visual Studio 05,08,10 and SQL server 05,08,08r2 and the respectable Windows server versions.

[Ezzaral]

Git, Mercurial and Subversion are all popular. It looks like most of them have plug-ins to work with Visual Studio.

We're using Subversion here and I like it well enough, but we work in Java so I can't speak to it's usage within VS.

[rubberman]

What Ezzaral says, and consider commercial tools as well such as ClearCase. We used ClearCase for a large development organization (one of the 60 largest application software companies in the world) that was spread all over the world (US, Canada, Europe, India, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea), and we were able to manage all of that well with ClearCase. It isn't cheap, but it works very well. We had to support rigorous software development and test/release processes (ISO-9001 certified) on a multi-platform basis - 5+ varieties of Unix plus Windows.

[Fortinbra]

We installed the trial of TFS 2010, and we're gonna run it in parallel to our existing development procedures, and see how well it works out for us. My boss, despite hating VSS, wants to take advantage of our Microsoft Gold Partnership as much as possible. So he wants us to stay with Microsoft products wherever possible.

[rubberman]

We installed the trial of TFS 2010, and we're gonna run it in parallel to our existing development procedures, and see how well it works out for us. My boss, despite hating VSS, wants to take advantage of our Microsoft Gold Partnership as much as possible. So he wants us to stay with Microsoft products wherever possible.

Ok. Pointy-hair manager wants comfortable solution, not best solution. Understand that. It's a Dilbert moment...

[Narue]

Pointy-hair manager wants comfortable solution, not best solution.

Sounds like a typical techie reaction to sound management practices. How do you define the "best" solution? Have you weighed the ROI of purchase, implementation, training, maintenance, and such against the "comfortable" solution? Have you considered technical support options? What about scalability and future-proofing?

So please, tell me why you think the chosen solution isn't best for the needs of the OP's company when you're lacking key variables. The manager hates VSS, which suggests that he's not a pointy-hair. Taking advantage of an existing Gold Microsoft partnership despite personal biases sounds to me like good judgement.

[rubberman]

Sounds like a typical techie reaction to sound management practices. How do you define the "best" solution? Have you weighed the ROI of purchase, implementation, training, maintenance, and such against the "comfortable" solution? Have you considered technical support options? What about scalability and future-proofing?

So please, tell me why you think the chosen solution isn't best for the needs of the OP's company when you're lacking key variables. The manager hates VSS, which suggests that he's not a pointy-hair. Taking advantage of an existing Gold Microsoft partnership despite personal biases sounds to me like good judgement.

Good point Narue. It was how the poster stated it that made me think that his manager was only interested in MS products because of their "Golden" relationship with the company. In my opinion, that is not a well-considered decision. I don't imply that it won't be a reasonable one for them, but there are other options out there, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. These days, I would go for more open source solutions, such as SVN or GIT because of the lesser likelihood of "vendor lock-in", but that's just my take on it. I've used ClearCase and a lot of other souce code control systems over the years. For really complex systems, ClearCase was a very strong solution for a company that is looking for a commercial product.

[Fortinbra]

The most up-to-date requirements list for what we need (this changes every 5min it seems)
Source file edit tracking
reports
Document tracking
and I don't know why, but SharePoint integration

My boss is usually pretty level headed, and he's not afraid to spend money where money needs to be spent, so I have that on my side. However, our current problem comes from the fact that our development burden keeps growing, so we have been bringing on new developers, and now our code is hard to follow, hard to manage, and is now bloating out of control. We aim to use a version control or source control to help us track changes, and to aid in the eventual optimization of code.

[rubberman]

The most up-to-date requirements list for what we need (this changes every 5min it seems)
Source file edit tracking
reports
Document tracking
and I don't know why, but SharePoint integration

My boss is usually pretty level headed, and he's not afraid to spend money where money needs to be spent, so I have that on my side. However, our current problem comes from the fact that our development burden keeps growing, so we have been bringing on new developers, and now our code is hard to follow, hard to manage, and is now bloating out of control. We aim to use a version control or source control to help us track changes, and to aid in the eventual optimization of code.

Been there, done that, as the saying goes! This is a management problem. In such cases, if the manager of the product line is not technically astute enough to control this process, you are in for a load of hurt! One such in our organization almost destroyed the premier MES for semiconductor manufacturing because he did not have the chops to understand what was really needed to control such an organization and keep it on focus. This was an organization that genereated $120M in revenues annually! Fortunately, upper management finally got a clue, and dropped his ass into the unemployment line... :-( Recovery from that was not fun.

Anyway, encourage him to engage the team in evaluating alternatives so that your organization will get what is the best solution available for your particular needs. This is NOT a one-size-fits-all situation. Also, challenge him on the Share Point issue - is it REALLY necessary? Is it a gating factor in truth? If so, then deal with that and use MS tools. If not, and it is simply a nice-to-have feature (for what purposes I can only imagine - NOT!), then de-prioritize that as a requirement.

[Fortinbra]

Personally, I don't even see the point in SharePoint, I know it's good for document control in an office environment, and we do use it already in the office for exactly that. We are still a small company though (~50 people), and we keep most of our documents on a local FTP server. The only documents we have in SharePoint are the mission critical ones that we want to control who can and cannot edit. So yeah, I guess I do see a need for SharePoint, but in the case of TFS, I've read a lot of the documentation for it, and it does seem like it fits what we need, especially since I don't foresee our company voluntarily dropping our Microsoft Partnership.

Anyone know of anything related to this that will aid in automated testing and building, and works with ASP.NET 2.0?

[divin757]

have been using svn tortoise and ankhsvn plugin for VS. works really well and its free.