David Mc :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

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’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

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

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