I hate being late to some parties and Subversion is a great example. Why didn’t somebody tell me about this? I love Visual Source Safe and have used it forever, but it definitely has limitations. I’d like to use Team System but I don’t really want to pay for it (no problem paying for MSDN, but I don’t want to throw $13K for the TS license). Subversion looks like a nearly perfect solution.
I’m still learning it. Right now I’m cheating by using TortoiseSVN, VisualSVN and VisualSVN’s server. All three install with little or no effort (Tortoise requires a reboot for some odd reason) and don’t seem to have much foot print.
What I want now is a good book on subversion so I can really know how it works. I’d also like to know how to write my own tools for it. Not that what I have doesn’t do everything I need, but there are a few things I’d like to have. Most important to me is a remote management console for the server. VisualSVN’s server tool doesn’t appear to work remotely (haven’t tried). My server is a separate machine and every time I need to do something I have to RDP over there to take care of the task. IF I had a local tool that would do the work remotely I’d be very happy.
One thing that really rocks about Subversion is that it works over HTTP (WebDAV I think). So if I want to share with a friend all I need to do is open a port in my firewall, route it to my server and give them an ID to access the repository. Doing that with VSS isn’t really possible.
Anyway – to the developers of Subversion: great job! To the VisualSVN guys – the check is in the mail. I’ll happily pay for your VisualStudio plug in.