Source Control with Visual Studio Integration (Preferably free)

Question

We've been using Visual Source Safe 6.0d for quite some time now, and it has served us well. However, upon attempting to upgrade to SourceSafe 2005, we discovered that it costs an arm and a leg! Additionally, it does not appear to be a painless upgrade. That said, we want a different solution that costs less money (preferrably free). As long as it has Visual Studio integration, it will work for us.

I've heard that SubVersion with the VisualSVN plugin is a good alternative. Anybody made this switch before? If so, how painful was it?

EDIT: We have a small group of developers, less than 10. We don't need to have source control over the web, it will just be internal.

Answer 1

I have used SVN for quite some time now and loves it's tight integration with CruiseControl.net regarding automated builds. I had used Tortoise for so long that I was quite comfortable with it's explorer plugins. However, many of my team members couldn't quite grasp Tortoise and complained constantly. Then we purchased VisualSVN and got them plugged in on that. All the pain went away and they were quite happy after that.

WAY BETTER THAN SourceSafe.

Answer 2

I'm a big fan of VisualSVN Server + AnkhSVN VS Integration. It's an easy and free setup and so far has been very painless. TortoiseSVN as a shell integration is an awesome compliment and well I don't know if you could do without.

Answer 3

VisualSVN also costs (50$ per seat iirc), you can use AnkhSVN which is free alongside VisualSVN server.

There are quite a few scripts people have written to migrate sourcesafe repo's into svn that retain history etc.

It is well worth the move.

Answer 4

We too were long-time users of Visual SourceSafe 6, and made the switch about 6 months ago to VisualSVN / TortoiseSVN, and we've never looked back. The extra productivity and flexibility its given our team of 4 developers is massive.

There is some getting used to the concepts of branching and merging, but nothing that isn't covered in the Subversion documentation.

I've found that I often use the TortoiseSVN Windows Explorer integration for most tasks like updating and committing, but VisualSVN is nicely integrated with the IDE and worth the money.

Answer 5

Have you considered SourceGear Vault?

It will be a painless transition from VSS. They have a VSS plugin for Visual Studio, as well as a standalone client.

The SourceGear Vault pricing page will let you calculate license prices. For 10 users, it's averaging about $240 USD each.

Answer 6

Our shop tried SVN quite a while ago, but after the bugginess we had with it (constantly updating tortoiseSVN, lack of good branching, and some other issues), we started to evaluate other options.

We finally settled on http://www.codicesoftware.com/xpfront.aspx PlasticSCM, it has some features of git/mercurial as far as really flexible branching and merging goes, and it integrates flawlessly with Visual Studio. Even some of our team members who had only used SourceSafe had no problems with it, as opposed to SVN.

Answer 7

If you want a XXI century tool for version control, maybe mercurial is the one for you, you'll have a distributed version control and you'll be able to choose among many options for the development and release cycle. You can install tortoisehg. The integration with Visual Studio can be done via visualhg. I blogged about that a time ago, I'm not able to put many links here yet, sorry.

With Mercurial you'll be able to use even outside your lan, there are plenty of options for publication and a central repository, or as I mentioned earlier, you can choose among many other aproximations for your source control.