Versioning for Dummies

Yes. VisualSVN (commercial)

Except for "automatically submits new versions" - that makes no sense. The day computers know when your code is ready to be committed and free of bugs is the day the world needs a lot less programmers

You commit when you're done a task, which effectively gives you a rollback point. It's also important to add a meaningful commit message ("Fixed crash when clicking on Save button") - this way you can find things easily later. A lot of new users to version control skip this part, and unfortunately only learn the hard way 3 months later when they need to go back and undo a fix/feature.

AnkhSvn is a free alternative, I've personally only used 1.x, which was really quite terrible. It definitely looks more usable in 2.x.

One upside to VisualSVN is that it uses TortoiseSVN for a lot of its dialogs. This means when you're working with subversion just from explorer, you have basically the same interface and same UI. Quite handy, as it lets you do things like edit images or text files without having to fire up VisualStudio, or edit scripts/installers, or other parts of a product that are not necessarily in VisualStudio.

+1 for speaking up against "auto-commit". That is not the job of subversion, but of a backup tool (such as Eclipse's local history, or Apple's Time Machine)

Thilo 2009-08-30 07:33:08

Simple (but terribly accurate) algorithm to decide if a given piece of code is bug-free: "function isBugFree() { return false; } ". ;-)

Thilo 2009-08-30 07:35:45

That's right, you need "commit". otherwise how would you indicate to your version control software that a certain set of changes belong to a certain revision? You want your changes to be ACID. If you didn't have "commit" then there would be no concept of a Transaction.

Roberto Sebestyen 2009-08-30 07:45:59

Plus, you really, really want meaningful commit messages, especially in a team, especially if you have a bug tracker or design documents you can refer to in there.

Thilo 2009-08-30 07:55:22

Agreed. People that want 'auto-commit' don't actually understand how to use SVN, IMHO.

Noon Silk 2009-08-30 07:57:56

gregmac: Classic files that I don't edit in VS are nant build scripts.

Noon Silk 2009-08-30 07:58:55

AnkhSvn 2.x is definitely usable when compared to version 1.x. I actually learned to use combination of AnkhSvn and TortoiseSVN. While I do most of my tasks in TortoiseSVN, AnkhSvn allows me to move and copy files around from Visual Studio in a way that records the changes to SVN.

Filip Navara 2009-08-30 08:30:04

Basically i want it to make a sumbission whenever it builds without errors, so that things actually get checked in more than once a month! :D

RCIX 2009-08-30 10:19:11

i'm what you would call a short attention span person....

RCIX 2009-08-30 10:21:14

RICX: Again, I think that would be useless. I personally build sometimes 40 times a day. Ending up with thousands of checkins without commit messages is basically worthless - you'll spend hours whenever you need to go back to remove a feature or find out how you did a fix, etc. I'd suggest trying it manually for a while. You'll probably find you get used to it very quickly and it becomes a natural thing - write a bug fix/feature, test it, commit it to svn, and then repeat.

gregmac 2009-08-30 18:08:07

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Versioning for Dummies

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