Which would you rather use: VisualSVN or AnkhSVN?

Question

1. Which is easier to use in a team environment?
2. Which is less buggy?
3. Which do you think is "better" and why?

Answer 1

If cost was not an issue, I would definitely prefer VisualSVN. I tried both and VisualSVN seemed less buggy (especially when renaming files and/or folders through Visual Studio). In fact, my entire team used VisualSVN and I don't recall a single problem or moment of instability.

Answer 2

We use Ankh+Tortoise here, and Ankh hasn't quite handled the 2.0 transition yet for our system. Trying to update or commit a project within visual studio if the project is in a working copy of the entire repository, it will try to work above the folder level of the project and update everything. That's probably an issue with how our repository is set up (the guy who did it had no clue what he was doing), but Ankh should still be able to compensate. Tortoise has been pretty solid, though.

BTW, I'm also in Madison.

Answer 3

I used AnkhSVN for about a year and it worked very well. Though there were one or two times when it caused VS to hang, it didn't happen after I updated.

I haven't used VisualSVN...

Trying both or just go with AnkhSVN since it's free. If you like it great, if not try VisualSVN. You can't go wrong.

Also I typically use several SVN clients and tend to do different things with different clients. For example I like to browse the repository and diff with Tortoise, but I like doing merges by the command line client so I know exactly what's happening

Answer 4

I'm one of the AnkhSVN developers, so I shall not comment on which you should choose.

But why don't you try for yourself? VisualSVN has a 30 days trial, and AnkhSVN is free.

AnkhSVN 2.0 contains more new code, than code from AnkhSVN 1.X and AnkhSVN is now a real VAPI SCC provider. When comparing the products you should look at AnkhSVN 2.0 and Visual SVN (And not at AnkhSVN 1.X, as that is a completely different beast)

The current version of AnkhSVN and VisualSVN are both built on Subversion 1.5 and you can just switch between them.

When you are evaluating AnkhSVN 2.0 I would recommend looking at the preview of the next AnkhSVN too. On http://anhsvn.net/daily you can find daily builds with the latest fixes and new features.

[Note that the SCC VAPI implemented by AnkhSVN 2.0 is a different thing than the the old style MSSCCI api of previous Visual Studio versions. MSSCCI forced its implementation to use checkout-checkin with read only files, while the new one allows providing your own workflow.]

Answer 5

I used AnkhSVN for a few weeks and deleted it frustrated afterward. After some research I found VisualSVN and what can I say: It's a seamless integration between Subversion/TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio. I used it about two weeks and ordered the full version afterward. I'm now quite happy with it for nearly two years and don't notice any serious bugs.

Sure, it isn't free. But for academic use or for OpenSource projects you can get a free license. And companies should spend the license costs, it's worth it!

So, what are the advantages:

• See your changes in the realtime. All changed parts of a file are marked right there in the Visual Studio editor
• automatically puts every created item under Subversion
• VisualSVN allows you to perform refactorings transparently by standard Visual Studio means or third party tools (such as ReSharper). Complete history is preserved.
• file management operations such as Drag&Drop, Copy&Paste and Save As are supported with also preserving complete history
• Integral status is displayed for any versioned element in the Solution Explorer including files, forms, aspx-pages, folders and virtual folders
• ...and many more...

Without VisualSVN I wouldn't have the leisure to make a repository for every project I code on. It's worth a try with the 30 days test period. :)

Answer 6

I think the main reason why I am using AnkhSVN is because it is installed as a Visual Studio Source Control plugin, rather than as an outside application that interacts with Visual Studio...

Answer 7

ankh is free VisualSVN is not. VisualSVN worked right out of the box. Ankh had issues for me in VS2k8. Get what you pay for...

Answer 8

I had problems with AnkhSvn when I tried it 12 months ago. I uninstalled it and went with VisualSVN which has been trouble free since.

Answer 9

AnkhSVN is free, which is a great price :-)

My only complaints with it are when a configuration setting gets messed up - good luck trying to figure out what to do. The documentation isn't very good, either. And a lot of buttons on the UI are always disabled, which is a little weird.

That being said, for the most part, it has a lot of functionality and the integration with VS is pretty nice. I like it.

Answer 10

Tried both. Sometimes free things are just too cheap. If you get my drift.

VisualSVN all the way. You could get one functional for 49$ or less.

Answer 11

vote: Visual SVN

Answer 12

I have never used VisualSVN, but I use AnkhSVN every day, and I've never had a single problem with it yet (though, to be fair, I use TortoiseSVN for many things that I can't be bothered to figure out how to do with AnkhSVN).

Answer 13

I tried both but ended up going with an alternative suggestion. Here's a post that describes how to integrate TortoiseSVN with the Visual Studio toolbar.

Answer 14

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/423687/which-plugin-do-you-use-for-using-svn-inside-visual-studio

Answer 15

I tried both and IMO AnkSVN is better. The features are almost the same in both products, but AnkhSVN just works, whereas VisualSVN could not connect to my repository.

What's even worse, the support for VisualSVN was non-exsitant. In lack of any alternatives, I posted to the VisualSVN support forum, but go no reply within the 5 days I checked. Since version 2.0 of AnkhSVN was released, it worked flawlessly on my system, so I really don't see any reason to ever give VisualSVN another try.

Answer 16

Today I did a bake off with ankh and visualsvn on 2 machines. On my very first operation, Ankhsvn failed to create the repository for a solution. It throws up a dialog with a red circle error icon, saying something about selecting a folder, but there is no folder to pick. There were no instructions or help for this when I clicked the help button. I even tried manually creating the repository and pointing ankh to it, with the proper url format, same error.

Then with visualsvn I had it out in the weeds in about 1 minute. It created the repository for the solution, no problem. Then I explored the menus for it a bit, and tried the commit. Bunch of added files to commit, okay looks right, but the commit hung somewhere. I got tried of waiting so I hit the x button. Bad idea. Now it won't do anything with subversion, says to cleanup, but cleanup won't run due to a lock -- a subversion lock I have to research I guess. So visualsvn is better than ankh on my bake off, and I did get visualsvn to work by starting over (deleted all the .svn folders) and letting the commit finish. Dialog text is cutoff too, I use hi-res with large fonts, need to test for this.

Answer 17

AnkhSVN is unbeatable IMHO.

The price is great (free), the features are superb and most important of all: it is actively developed with dailies occuring, hmmm, daily ;)

Answer 18

Does anyone have any experiences from recent daily build of AnkhSVN? Please let me know if it is good to go with?

Secondly does it seamlessly integrate with TortoiseSVN? What I mean here is that if I checkout from within Visual Studio (with AnkhSVN plugin installed), will it be identified by Tortoise SVN that it is a changed file? or the other way?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 19

Same same but different. It's funny how those who never tried VisualSVN say that AnkhSvn is better. I used both. I am going back to Visual SVN for one single feature that i miss. "Revert this block only". If it saves me a few minutes a week - it's worth it.

Answer 20

I haven't tried either of these yet, but I'll be trying AnkhSVN first. It looks like if I have problems (other than SVN's inherent frustrations), the Ankh team is pretty responsive and interested in all the details.

Has anyone used VSTortoise?