Late last year the company I work for decided they had finally had enough of Source(Un)Safe, the aging source control from Microsoft which is as safe as printing out your projects source code then burning it.
The last major release branch of our source took 3 days on an 8 core system with fast raid array. One year on and fear was starting to set in as to how long the next branch would take.
We had looked at moving the development team to the Team System edition of Visual Studio for its updated source control but soon discounted that. You have to be a COMPLETE MORON to pay that much per seat.
Even though we are a Microsoft based shop we decided to look outside the Microsoft fold. Subversion was system that kept grabbing our attention. I spent the next week in evaluation of Subversion, TortoiseSVN and the Mindscape Visual Studio File Explorer then recommended the combination as the replacement Source Control for the company for a number of reasons.
- Well supported open, very active open source source solution.
- Many different tools available so not tied to one supplier.
- Works on all platforms. Windows, Linux and Mac.
- True Client/Server based solution.
- Easy to configure and use.
- TortoiseSVN has to be one of the best Source Control tools I have seen.
- We had a means to port the full change history from Source Control into Subversion.
- All related changes are stored as a single revision, not file by file like Source Safe.
- The Mindscape plugin for VS means you have full Source Control integration in the VS IDE.
- A code branch has ZERO cost.
The biggest change we found was the mindset shift from the Source Safe pessimistic style locking to the optimistic file locking offered by Subversion. Merge programming is never fun but as the supplied merge tools are easy to use that has not been an issue at all.
A few months down the line and I have to say it is the best move we could have made. There is not one member in the team that misses Source Safe, Subversion improves the Source Control experience on so many level.
f you still use Source Safe…. WHY? Subversion is a FREE, powerful and flexible replacement that will mean your source code actually is safe!
