I have to admit that this is quite a tired topic. At my company someone complains
about VSS almost every day. For quite some time, I've done a fair amount of
browsing on the internet for a free alternative to VSS. At the moment Subversion appears
to be the most feasible alternative. I'm not going to blog about all the features
and why one would choose it over CVS for example since there are several sites out
there that do that. What I will do is simply record some useful links so that
when the topic rears it's head again I can point people to the right places.
The sites/pages that one should go to are:
-
Subversionary - Why
not VSS - I particularly enjoy the fact the Microsoft don't even use Visual Source
Safe internally (a claim that has been substantiated by a colleague who outsourced
there recently). This very same page has the following to say about VS Team
System: "paper it looks good but in actual practice it is very slow, resource intensive,
and most-importantly unstable".
-
TortoiseSVN - Integrates with windows
explorer and is similar to the CVS version
-
SubversionSharp -
A C# wrapper around the subversion API. It depends on AprSharp which
is the Apache Portable Runtime wrapper.
-
AnkhSVN - This is a Visual Studio add-in
(does not implement the SCC API) that provides SVN integration. They track
their progress using CIA.
-
SVN SCC Proxy - Provides Visual Studio
integration by implementing the SCC API and acting as an intermediary between VS and
SVN.