Looking for Recommendations on Version Control System with Intuitive (.NET) API?

Question

I'm working on a project which generates (composite) Microsoft Word documents which are comprised of one or more child documents. There are tens of thousands of permutations of the composite documents. Far too many for users to easily manage. Users will need to view/edit the child documents through the app which hides all of the nasty implementation details. A requirement of the system is that the child documents must be version controlled. That is what has been tripping me up.

I've been torn between using an off-the-shelf solution or rolling my own. At a minimum, the system needs to support get latest, get specific version, add new, rename and possibly delete. I’ve whiteboarded it enough to realize it won’t be a trivial task to create my own. As far as commercial systems I have VSS and TFS at my disposal. I've played with the TFS API some, but it isn’t as intuitive or well documented as I had hoped. I'm not averse to an open source solution (e.g. SVN), but I have less familiarity with them.

Which approach or tool would you recommend? Why? Do you have any links to API documentation you would recommend?

Environment: C#, VS2008, SQL Server 2005/2008, low volume (a few hundred operations per day)

Answer 1

SharePoint does a pretty good job of document management, with versioning, etc. It also has plenty of APIs and is a much more modern approach than using the COM layer for VSS. SP would be a good solution if you are writing this as an enterprise solution (dedicated server, etc), but not so good for a desktop or small-business/SOHO app.

Answer 2

Its actually pretty easy to get rolling with document versioning in Sharepoint. If you setup a new list you will be able to define version options for attachments and list items right in the SP list settings.

You can also get a much more detailed control over versioning by using the SP webservices. If your planning on doing all of your document access from within your application, and don't want to have to push users into the Sharepoint site I would use this approach. Here is a good tutorial to get started with SP versioning

Answer 3

Give a try to Plastic SCM. It's distributed, has a great GUI, it can work as centralized too and you'll find tons of .NET assemblies to hook your code.