ASP.NET - Source control tool for .NET 3.5.

Question

I am going to develop my first application (4 members team).I am not aware of source control tool ( Visual

source safe,Tortoise SVN).

My .NET version is 3.5. What is the best source control tool ?

Is CruiseControl a source control tool ?

Answer 1

Your choice of a versioning system does not have to do anything with the .NET version you are using.

I'd vote for Subversion / Tortoise SVN. It's rock-solid, has lots of handy features, widely adopted and free.

Answer 2

Definitely avoid Visual Source Safe.

Subversion is probably a safe choice, but you will have to elaborate about your situation (E.g. how big is your team?) to get more specific advice.

Answer 3

Before we start talking about source control, I would like you to consider your actual need for it, if this is to be your first .NET application. Is this your actual first attempt of writing some .NET 3.5 code? If so, I doubt that you need to worry about source control just yet. I would say it's not just a little bit overkill for the first learning projects.
On the other hand, if this is to be your first application that you'll actually sell to someone, it's a completely different matter.

I currently use VisualSVN, an add-in to Visual Studio that lets you do check-in, check-out etc from within the environment. Along with it, I use the free SVN repository service at XP-Dev. It works well for me =)

Answer 4

(quated part is no more important since you edited your post about team size)

If you are doing some small project on your own, maybe you shouldn't use code versioning at all because you probably don't need it. Code versioning helps you with central code storage, multi-person development code merging (several people working on the same file and then commit changes) and code branching to name the most important ones.

If I were you, and I would be the only person developing something simple, I wouldn't use it, because it would also be a bit of a time-overkill.

But otherwise source control doesn't address technology like .Net framework version. Code control only stores files (with history) and is able to merge text files. Written in whatever language possible.

If you are part of a team I'd suggest using Subversion + TortoiseSVN + AnkhSVN

And No, CruiseControl is not a code versioning system. It's a continuous integration system.

Answer 5

Another no vote for Visual Source Safe here.

Might be an idea to get familiar with subversion as - just as others mentioned - it's widely adopted, so might be useful in the future and simply works..oh and it's free too! TortoiseSVN integrates into the windows explorer and is both easy to use and well documented so I would give it a try.

If it's a small project of yours and you don't want to worry about hosting, I would recommend signing up for a free account at something like beanstalk, to keep it safe, without any hassle.

But if it's your first ever project, it might just give you too many additional things to learn about, so you might want to put it aside for a while.

Answer 6

Try GIT, it's much lighter weight than svn

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gitextensions/

you can use a local repository for just checking in your own work (to keep a history, or to keep a working version before changing everything) Or you can connect to a central repository for enterprise source control.

The company where I work used to use the SVN, Tortoise, Ankh stack but we're using Git now. Plus I use it at home on my on play projects.

Answer 7

If you have a pure Windows environment then VisualSVN server is a Windows version of SVN server and installs easily and cleanly. You can setup security using Windows usernames and passwords, or SVN usernames and passwords.

You can then use Tortoise to provide integration in Explorer and VisualSVN to provide Visual Studio integration (there's a small cost for VisualSVN) or you could try AnkhSVN if all you want is VS integration and don't want to spend any money. Personally I prefer VisualSVN's integration.

Running a GIT server under Windows is, umm, frankly a pain in the ass, and not a route I'd recommend for beginners. VS integration is also fraught with pain.

As with everyone else I'd say avoid SourceSafe like the plague.

CruiseControl is not a source control system, it's an automated build server. It monitors source control servers looking for changes, then checks everything out, compiles it and runs it through your unit tests, so people know if they've broken the build. Once you have source control up and running it's the next big step towards a better build environment.