Why I’m replacing SVN with TFS after only a few weeks
A few weeks ago I got very serious about my personal development environment. Part of that was getting proper version control in place. I’m working on “real projects” at home, I should be have a “real environment”, right? So, I decided to give Subversion a try. After all, it was free, I already had a FreeBSD server set up with Apache configured… why not? Plus, what other choices are out there? Visual Source Safe is ancient and pretty bad to boot. CVS was superceded by SVN. Team Foundation Server is… well… let’s just say that it took me a week to install it the first time I touched it. A lot of very smart folks I know use SVN. So I gave it a shot.
And you know what? SVN is pretty good, from what I saw of it. Is it a fully integrated, head-to-toe solution like TFS? Nope, but it doesn’t aim to be, either. The install process was smooth and easy, other than one “Doh!” mistake on my part (not granted the Apache user access to the repository). After less than a few days of using it, I decided to move on. And tonight, I just finished an TFS install, that same TFS install I didn’t want to make ever again.
What went wrong with my SVN experience had nothing to do with SVN itself, and everything to do with the tools to access SVN from a Windows box. You see, the initial install of TFS might have taken me a week the first time around and most of a night the second time. But once it is installed, that’s it, I’m done, and I can take off the “sys admin hat” and put on my “developer hat” and get to work. But with Tortoise SVN (which integrates SVN to Windows Explorer), and Ahnk SVN (which integrates SVN to Visual Studio), I did not have that experience. Every check in was downright painful, to the point where I was leaving stuff checked out longer than I liked, to avoid the headaches that SVN was giving me. Every check in would be this voodoo dance of trying to commit, then running “clean up”, then trying to commit only specific items and then only cleaning up specific items, and then being told that things were locked, and exiting Visual Studio, then running clean up again, and finally being able to get my work checked in.
After a few days of this rediculousness, I realized that a few nights of trying to install TFS more than offset a lifetime of misery. SVN, I hardly knew ye. Maybe when the Windows clients are of a higher quality I will give you another shot. But until then, I need to get work done, and TFS lets me do that without any hassle at all.
J.Ja
Now, that’s just sad. (Sniffles…)
@Dietrich Schmitz
Yeah, it is. I was really planning on using SVN and then bringing other tools into the mix to get the full stack going on. Instead, I now have the monolithic TFS which does it all. The only thing that TFS really stands out from the crowd on, is having the whole stack in one product, and seemless Visual Studio integration. At an individual level, nearly all of its components are merely “adequete”. I feel that it’s source control and build systems are a touch aobve average, and the reporting is awful (thanks to SQL Server Reporting Services).
J.Ja
I had similiar experiences with SVN, explorer crashing etc. Don’t know why people like an unstable product.
However I can’t wait till TFS Basic 2010:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/10/02/announcing-tfs-basic.aspx
A 20 minute install of TFS Basic using simple wizards.
@Justin James
In what language are you coding?…
@Dietrich Schmitz
C#, for better or for worse. That being said, I am looking at a move to Delphi for part of the project (potentially), as well as OutSystem’s Agile Platform (for the Web front end). Agile Platform has baked in source control, which is one thing that I truly like about it (as well as 1 button deploy and rollback, which rocks).
J.Ja
@Justin James
I see. I was writing Delphi Medical Electronic Claims processing modules with Borland Delphi 1.0 in the mid 90s. Some interesting trivia–Anders Hejlsberg, the Father of Borland Turbo Pascal and Delphi, was hired (snatched) away from Borland along with about ten other employees and developed C# for MS.
@Dietrich Schmitz
Yup, I stumbled across that fact when I wrote an article about Delphi a few years ago. I loved Delphi 1, I had just learned Pascal and I had seen VB 3 but Delphi blew me away! So much so, that I spend $99 that I didn’t have (credit card) as a college student to buy an academic license copy, even though at the time, I had no qualms with copying software without paying for it.
J.Ja
@Chris
Nice! The biggest issues with the TFS install are:
* SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), “out of the box”, is not compatable with the TFS installation, you need to monkey with it (usually deleting the encryption keys) to get it to work.
* SP1 is still not slipstreamed into the installer, so you need to do that to get SQL Server 2008 support.
* TFS application tier will not install in 64 bit Windows Server.
In addition, the TFS product has a huge problem with not setting permissions on the SharePoint and SSRS ends of projects correctly. I always forget to do it, then a week later, someone complains that they get the “dreaded red X”.
J.Ja
@Chris
What? Explorer crashing? Now that is unusual. (wink)
I am using SVN with Tortoise and have not encountered the problems you mention.
I used Tortoise SVN at work for a while. I wish those were my only problems. It kept removing my changes and taking old code from inside SVN and merging it with my current live code. Almost with every commit. Maybe if SVN had a “I dont give a crap what is on the server, use mine” option, things would be better. But, I said screw it, spent about 4 hours installing TFS and haven’t looked back. No weirdness when checking in or out. It just works. And I don’t have to rewrite entire projects because it decides that my changes weren’t necessary….I will never use SVN again. Those workaround to get it installed wasn’t that bad seeing as how MS put on there site exactly what needs to be done for 2008. It was a bummer about the 64-bit though.
Two words (or is it one?): VisualSVN
I’ve been using svn/VisualSVN for VS 2005/2008/2010 for some time now. Seamless Visual Studio integration, very stable, intuitive. It just works.
OK, it costs $49 bucks but its been more than worth it. They also package svn server up nicely to work on windows. That part’s free.
-k
@Kelly Harrison
A few weeks ago I was talking to someone else about this issue too. What he told me is that he had the exact same issues with SVN that I did, until he stopped using Tortoise and Ahnk, and starting using a command line client. I think that the general consensus is that the Tortoise and Ahnk clients are the perpetrators. At the time, the SVN page really pointed to them as, “this is what you want to use”. If I were a member of the SVN community, I would be evangelizing alternative clients to death, because Tortoise and Ahnk make SNV look bad.
J.Ja
I don’t see what the problem is you guys are having with Subversion. We’ve been using it at work for 2-3 years now and we all really love it. Have you actually tried using a truly painful system like ClearCase? Subversion and TortoiseSVN are truly wonderful puffs of fresh air, we can’t imagine running a project anymore without either of them. I just wish there was a folder explorer like TortoiseSVN available for Linux. VisualSVN is a great distribution of an SVN server for Windows, it installs easy and works great with little to no problems.
David – Yes, I’ve used ClearCase. I’d rather just work with directories that I create myself and attach version numbers to! ClearCase was so miserable, I needed to keep a “cheat sheet” on my desk even for simple stuff…
My problem with Subversion is *not* the server peice (although I wasn’t thrilled with it). It’s the clients. TortoiseSVN works for you? Cool. It didn’t work for me, and it doesn’t work for a number of people I’ve talked to. Checking stuff in often involved 10, 15 minutes of troubleshooting, cleaning, reconnecting, etc. Using version control should not be difficult! AnkhSVN seems to be built on top of Tortoise, or have a shared component, because they exhibit identical, broken behavior (which is why I originally blamed SVN itself). The Subversion folks need to remove the references to Tortoise and Ankh from their site, because those apps make SVN look miserable.
Everyone out there who has used “something other than SVN” that isn’t Visual Source Safe, ClearCase or CVS says the same thing, they’ll never go back to Subversion. Doesn’t mater if it’s Rally, Git, Team Foundation Server, Murcurial, whatever… Subversion is a lot like Bugzilla, it’s only good if you’ve never used anything else.
J.Ja