Setting up a new team work environment for asp.net

Question

Hi, We own a small company and develop asp.net websites. Here is our work procedure: We have a server at the company with Sql Server 2008 and IIS 7.5 installed on it. All our projects including the database and website pages are on the server. We connect to the server and edit the files using FTP, so any change to a web page can be seen at once. The programmers (less than 10 programmers) connect to the server using Visual Studio 2010.

Now we want to include source control system in our work. The problem is including a SCM in our work requires changing our way of working.

Does anyone have any advise on setting up the working environment?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You first need to decide on what type of SCM you are going to use - centralized or distributed.

One centralized SCM is TFS - this is from MS and integrates very will with VS. I believe there is an express (basic) version that is free, but the other editions are quite expensive.

An easy and free centralized SCM to start with is subversion - you can install the SVN server on your server and setup a client for each developer.

A distributed SCM does not have a server - a popular one is GIT.

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Do read up on all of these before deciding. You will also have to figure out a good workflow for your team. Start with a small project so you can gain understanding and minimize the cost of mistakes.

Answer 2

So many ways to do this :)

One way is to use something like http://beanstalkapp.com/ to store your source code under SVN. Each developer then has a local copy of the code to work on and a good history of changes is kept when developers commit their code (at least daily), and these changes can be emailed around to the team if you want them to be. One member of the team is then tasked with uploading the latest SVN code to the testing server once it's tested and approved locally (probably at the end of each day).

I'd recommend your developers install http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/ Toolbar into Visual Studio if you use SVN.

As an alternative to hosting your SVN repository with someone like Beanstalk, you could use the free http://www.visualsvn.com/server/ which cuts out the need to upload the latest code to your testing server, as it'd be stored right there and updated on each SVN commit. But this adds an overhead in terms of backups etc.

Let us know what road you go down in the end.

Answer 3

Hi, Thank you guys for your ideas. I would be glad to hear more from other guys, if possible.

Thanks again.