Cheaper Alternative to Visual Studio Team Foundation?

Question

Is there a fairly inexpensive source control product on the market that integrates into Visual Studio 2008+ and that has the power and capabilities of Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation?

I have used Dynamsoft, SourceGear, Subversion and Platic SCM and reckon that neither of these products can come close to Team Foundation.

I ideally would be interrested in a product that 1) handles conflict resolution well 2) handled IDE edits, renames and deletes automatically 3) easy project management within the source control "server" that allows a project administrator to painlessly manipulate the project structure as they see fit.

Answer 1

Subversion with Tortoise SVN

Here is an article by Rick Strahl on setting everything up.

I used svn at my last job, and tfs at my current one. I can't say I really like having to deal with tfs on a day to day basis.

Answer 2

Try visualsvn.

EDIT

Use VisualSvn as server (my bad, should have clarified I meant that), and as for the client, I used AnkhSVN, which got quite good over time.

Answer 3

What features of Team Foundation in particular are you interested in?

If you're just interested in Source Code Control, there are many plugins available for various other products. Subversion for instance has several plugins available which give a very similar experience to the Team Foundation plugin. AnkSVN is my personal favorite.

• http://help.collab.net/topic/com.collabnet.anksvn.doc/concepts/ankh_whatis.html

Answer 4

SubVersion and AnkhSVN will integrate directly into Visual Studio.

Answer 5

Actually, I've recently started using Team Foundation at work. Some of it is nice, but our team has spent at least 10 hours in total last week to fix silly TFS problems that never should have occurred in the first place.

While it isn't perfect, I find Subversion superior in many ways when it comes to plain source control. Get TortoiseSVN and shell out 50 bucks for VisualSVN if you want an integrated solution.

Answer 6

Personally I much prefer SourceGear Vault to SVN.

But it's hard to argue with free, and Vault is pretty expensive if you have more than 2 users.

Answer 7

We're going with Git but it probably doesn't have the integration with VS2008 you'd want.

Git manual: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html

Answer 8

From what I hear, VisualHg is a good Visual Studio addin for the Mercurial distributed source-control system. You just need to install TortoiseHg and then VisualHg, and you'll be up and running.

Answer 9

Mike,

If you are just looking for source control, the answer is yes.

If you are looking for an inexpensive replacement for everything that TFS does (build, test, project management, etc.) the answer is heck, no.

Answer 10

Well, you could use SVN and bug tracking solutions such as Trac. There is a Trac Visual Studio plugin. There is algo Redmine, though I don't know about VS plugins.

If all you do is to "view, compare, attach changesets to work items and annotate", I guess bug tracking solutions are quite good.