Basic Source control

Question

I know this question has been beaten to death, resurrected, shot twice, resurrected again, and then buried, even at the risk of all the above, I'm still going to ask.

What would be the best source control for someone who:

• is an older experienced programmer (not that willing to learn stuff he doesn't think he needs)
• never uses source control before
• still uses file_v31-2.dat principle
• is driving us crazy when something in his scheme of things goes wrong (which is why I'm asking this)

I'm looking for something that will work within Visual Studio, and have a very simple interface, with the most important feature to being able to see how the program developed, and being able to diff between "versions" (as I said, basic). But the main requirement is that it's simple, and easy to pickup. He doesn't need distributed systems (although Git extensions do seem pretty simple to me), so I was thinking Ankh or VisualSVN.

What would be your alternatives ?

Answer 1

VisualSVN

Answer 2

Perforce is powerful, easy to pick up, and has excellent Visual Studio integration. It all works with a minimum of fuss (unlike SVN + adjuncts), and up to two people can use it without restriction for free.

Answer 3

SourceGear's Vault might fit the bill. It's as simple as Visual Source Safe and free for a single user. http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/

Answer 4

I think SVN with VisualSVN or Ankh will work. The real crux is changing the culture of the team to use source control. Which one is almost a secondary question until the team agrees to WHY they should use source control.

As for going for what your team needs it seems that almost any of the main source control systems will work for your team to get into the basics. As your team's get comfortable with using source control and needs more advanced functionality then I would consider shopping if the one you started with doesn't seem to fit for you.

Here's a nice tutorial on Source Control in general which may help your team get to the WHY they should use it. http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source%5Fcontrol.html

UPDATE BASED ON YOUR COMMENTS:

@Blake - I hope you don't mind me saying so, but that is pretty narrow minded point of view. But, no, :), firing him isn't an option. He's a specialist in his field (not programming related field), and if we really tried we probably wouldn't find more than fifty of such caliber in the world. We're not a typical programming team, that we share work, collaborate between ... and such - most of us work alone each on our own. But, as I said in my comment to @Outlaw - I'm just trying to help him, by introducing him a new point of view, from what he's doing now.

No, not exactly. We're not a programming firm, strictly speaking. We're a specialized engineering firm, with a lot of programming involved (cfd). So we have a lot of people here, of various profiles. But this is not about colaborating between programmers; this is more of helping him, but in a way that I don't want to patronize him. So I just want to suggest an easier way of what he's doing now.

This presents a much better picture to us. Many of us responding are coming at the angle of a development team.

In this case, I think your best bet is to demo Source Control to him. Perhaps on something you are doing. Keep the demo simple. Perhaps start with SVN and Tortoise. Tortoise uses windows Explorer to manage the repository. See if he is interested. If he is then point him to the tutorial I listed above as this just talks about the basics of Source Control. Then you could suggest reading the SVN's basics chapter (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.basic.html).

If he's really hungry you could also show the integration with VS with VisualSVN or Ankh.

Perhaps he will bite on it and everyone will be the happier. :)

As an aside - A long term goal I would push for in the company even if they are engineers who program is to have a standard to use Source Control even IF it's just on their local machines.

Good Luck! :)

Answer 5

Why does this guy get his own source control? Shouldn't he use the same one your team is using? Also, if he's absolutely 100% dead-set against an SCM, couldn't you guys just work on a script that pushes his local files to your repository while creating an old-school backup dir on his own disk?

Answer 6

Maybe you can put together a tutorial on git and keep it very simple and show him exactly what needs to do in his scenario. Show him why it is messing you all up. That's what I suggest. You could try Visual SourceSafe but I don't think many people would call that source control. I would dare say it's better than what he is doing now.