or has (hopefully) SVN become a standard in .NET projects these days?
SourceSafe has had some improvements over the years, but my teams all use Team Foundation Server for Source Control. It also gives you Work Items, Bug Tracking, Productivity Reports, Application Lifecycle Management (to a degree), etc.
I believe they may even have a free or inexpensive workgroup edition for small teams.
-- Jason
I don't think there really is a standard. Large institutions or MS partners might well be using Team Foundation Server. You're more likely to find Subversion or similar in smaller shops. I'm in a large retail bank at the minute, they use Merant PVCS in here. In the IBank I was in previous to here they used the very ancient CVS. I've also seen Borland Starteam used within a client who was an MS partner - it integrates nicely into VS.
Subversion is quite popular and there is a nice plug in for Visual Studio called Ankh SVN that lets you work with subversion directly. So subversion is at least a good option for .NET development.
With that said, Team Foundation Server is great and it has some nice features that go beyond regular source control.
We use SVN for our .Net projects, using the Tortoise SVN client. There are also tools to integrate with Visual Studio such as Ankhsvn.
As with the others I don't see it as a standard, but I do see VSS used more, at least in the environments that I work in. I personally prefer SourceGear's Vault product myself.
- I'm getting back into .NET after numerous years in PHP/MySQL
Well done.
- back in 2002 on Microsoft projects we always used Visual SourceSafe and everyone hated it
Not much has changed there
- in modern day .NET projects do teams still use Visual SourceSafe, has it improved?
Yes, and no. I use SVN in my personal projects, but at work I've had to work with both SVN and VSS2005. As mentioned, there is no standard, and I find it pretty much depends on your team/corporate standard.
VSS has made improvements with the release of VSS 2005, and later several fixes to make it compatible with VS2008, however the gold standard for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 is Team Foundation Server. MS brands Team Foundation Server ( TFS ), as the server backend to Visual Studio's suite of products.
The down side is it can get a bit pricy. I personally have never used SVN, but if it has a direct integration with Visual Studio, ( I don’t want to have to go outside my IDE to check in/out a file EVER ), then it’s as good as any source control system.
TFS is Much more than source control though, as it has bug tracking, reporting, source control, collaboration tools ( through SharePoint ), and automated builds, ( to name a few ).
Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe
We use CVS, but looking to migrate to SVN.
Absolutely, yes they use SVN (and SourceSafe).
Both have IDE integration if you want it. (Or either can support check-ins from outside the IDE).
Certain free / paid project management sites are perfect for modern day small projects (like http://www.unfuddle.com or http://code.google.com/ ) and have built-in support for SVN.
IDE Integration with SVN: VisualSVN / AnkhSVN
IDE Integration with VSS: Built-in to Visual Studio.
I'm working in a big project (>500 developers) an we are using ClearCase. It's not for free and as I read in the www resource-heavy. But since I'm here, I got only tiny problems which could be solved in minutes. Working with SVN before was much harder (maybe because there was nobody which had big SVN-experience).
At the 3 .net-using companies I've worked for since 2003, all have used VSS and nobody at those companies seemed inclined to change, and one guy is actively against SVN.
we use SVN. It's much better than sourseSafe. One bad thing about Source Safe is that if you add a file to project, it checks out the whole project and if the user doesn't check in the project (which is the case most of the time), the project is locked out and then you have to findout who locked it. Source Safe is a no go for multip developer environment as it exclusively checks out the files. Svn on the other side allows the users to work at the same file at the same time (no exclusive locking) and then users the merge the changes. I have been using svn and have no complains.
My company uses Subversion and TortoseSVN (Explorer integration) and AnkhSVN (IDE Integration).
Along with this, we use Bitvise WinSSHD and Putty/Pageant to secure our source repository with SSH.
In addition, we use CruiseControl.Net, Nant and MSBuild for Continous Integration after comitting code to the repository.
I can't call it as standard but I think more and more .NET developers using SVN.
And now have got great tools such as:
I asked a question along the same vein. It might have some more insight for you.
Most of my work is done using SourceSafe, though some from another department is done using SVN. I probably prefer SVN over SourceSafe but it isn't my call to determine which version control system gets used.
SourceSafe is dead, Microsoft seem to of given up on it.
If you're working for a Microsoft shop (like me) then they're either..
*Still using SourceSafe and looking at moving to SVN or TFS in the VERY near future *Using SVN, have been for years and it works nicely. Probably using TortoiseSVN etc *Using TFS (Team Foundation Server) Microsofts SVN Killer that includes everything.
TFS comes at a high price and arguably it's unproven when compared to SVN. If you're a small shop then probably SVN is the default.
If you're a medium/large Microsoft shop then TFS will probably be the default.
Windows Systems Engineers like the fact it's just another SQLServer database to backup. They'll like all the reporting elements built in. WorkItems and bug tracking all built in. Though in my limited experience a bit clunky (we still use a 3rd party bug tracker).