Hello. I'm going to be building some ASP.Net MVC 2 software using Visual Studio 2010 and, as the only developer, I'd like to have some basic SCM in place to I can manage changes locally. I know most SCM solutions are designed to run on servers and accessed by multiple developers. What's an easy, simple SCM solution for a solo developer that wants to manage everything on a single Windows 7 machine?
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
A distributed VCS like git or mercurial would work just fine for a local repository, and you could always use your local repo as a master for future shared access.
I see three possibilities:
They are listed with increasing recommendation level, so I recommend last one most. (Although I should warn against using git, which isn't really considered the easiest to use of the family.)
In my experience, TFS, hands down, has the best integration with Visual Studio. All other source control providers offer lackluster support for .NET projects at best (this specifically comes into play with renaming, moving, and deleting files under source control).
That said, for a single developer, my recommendation would be to use AnkhSVN with free SVN hosting on projectlocker.
On the other hand, if you have a BizSpark or MSDN account, and have some time, you may want to set up TFS 2010, perhaps on a VM.
Perforce provide a 2-user non-expiring "evaluation" license. I believe this can be installed and used on a single PC.
If you already have the .NET stack installed on your machine and SQL Server (including Express Edition), you can have a single user version of SourceGear Vault for free. Works well on my fairly old XP Pro machine.