Hosted source code repositories

Question

I primarily work on small, personal projects. One of my challenges has been source code repository maintenance. I have used the basic version of Team Foundation Server provided by my MSDN license and while it works great, it's not ideal (I'm not doing backups like I should, etc). I'd really rather pay to have it hosted. I like TFS, but I'm open to other options as well (since hosted TFS seems really expensive).

Any suggestions on providers to look at? So long as they integrate nicely with Visual Studio, I'm willing to consider anything.

Answer 1

Look at the ankhsvn plugin to get Subversion to work in Visual Studio, then there are a lot of low-cost options.

Answer 2

I have been very happy using GitHub for my personal projects. You can either use the free service, which requires you to use public repositories, or you can pay for private ones.

Using Git with Visual Studio offers help on setting up Visual Studio to work with git.

Answer 3

Github works extremely well for hosting Git repositories, and integrates with visual studio via Git Extensions. It's not a perfect integration due to the face that Git works fundamentally differently than SVN and TFS (due to it being a distributed source control).

Answer 4

Subversion and Git integrate really well with Visual Studio. I think Mercurial does, too, but I only have personal experience with the other two.

All three of those have plenty of very affordable hosting providers available. In fact, if your code is open source, then all three of those have gratis hosting providers available. On Assembla, you even get gratis private Subversion and Git repositories up to 2 GiByte.

Answer 5

If you're not working with other people, I can recommend Visual SVN. The data is stored locally (making it simple to create a backup if you like), you get all the benefits of SVN history, etc., and if you like, you could turn your computer into your own SVN server.

Answer 6

The only company I know doing TFS hosting is SAAS Made Easy. Their prices seem pretty reasonable, and I've considered using them for my startup TFS hosting, but ultimately decided to host locally with offsite backups of the database, since I've got a developer base of 1. If I had a distributed team, I would seriously consider these guys.

Answer 7

mercurial.
i using it because you don't need server.
(and it very fast)

Answer 8

Consider Mercurial. It integrates amazingly well with vs.net and if you have multiple machines you're working from you will have by definition a backup on every machine. There's a great mercurial (and dvcs in general) intro by Joel Spolsky here: http://hginit.com/

Its similar to git but has a much lower learning curve and in my opinion easier to work with on windows while still being cross platform.

For hosting http://bitbucket.org is very popular. You can get started free and you get a good bit for $5/mo. As an added bonus codeplex and google code also support mercurial.

Also, consider hosting the repository yourself. Throw apache on an always on machine at your house. Combine it with an open port and dynamic dns you have your source code securely available to you anywhere in the world and totally under your control.