Alternative to VSS for a one man show (army of one?)

Question

I\'ve been programming for 10+ years now for the same employer and only source code control we\'ve ever used is VSS. (Sorry - That\'s what they had when I started). There\'s

Answer 1

Don't worry about VSS corrupting you, worry about VSS corrupting your data. It does not have a good track record in that department.

Back up frequently if you do not switch to a different version control system. Backups should be happening daily even with other SCMs, but it's doubly important with VSS.

Answer 2

If you are a one man show and strictly a Microsoft shop, then SourceGear Vault is definitely a prime candidate for switching too.

Features:

• Free for Single User, great for you
• It uses SQL Server for it's backend, therefore data reliability is huge
• It has atomic check-ins, all files checked-in at the same time are arranged in a group and are called a changeset.
• VisualStudio integration.
• Has a tool for importing from SourceSafe, therefore you can keep your history
• The client communicates with the server over HTTP, therefore accessing the source outside the office remotely can be setup very easily and performs well, because they only transfer the deltas of the changes being submitted and received. You can use SSL to secure the connection.

I would definately consider this as an option.

Answer 3

If you only have 2 people, and you mostly work independantly, git is going to give you a lot more flexibility, power, and be far and away the fastest to work with.

It is however a pain in the backside to use. Using VSS you're obviously programming for windows - if you're doing Win32 API stuff in C then git will be a learning curve but will be quite interesting.

If the depths of your knowledge however only extend to ASP and Visual Basic, just use subversion. Walk before you can run.

** I'm not trying to say if you only know VB you're dumb or anything like that, but that git can be very finicky and picky to use (if you've used the WinAPI in C you know all about picky and finicky), and you may want a more gradual introduction to SCM than git provides

Answer 4

Looks like SubVersion is the winner here. I'd do yourself a favor and use VisualSVN Server. It's free and will save you a bunch of installation headaches.

Answer 5

If you want a full Life Cycle in one package then you probably want want to look at Visual Studio Team System. It does require a server, but you can get a "Action Pack" from MS that includes all the licencies that you need for "Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition" from the Partner centre.

With this you will get Bug, Risk and Issue tracking as well as many other features :)

• Source Control
• Work Item Tracking (Requirements, Bugs, Issues, Risks and Tasks)
• Reporting on your project data (Work Item Tracking, Build, Checkins and more in one qube)
• Code Analysis
• Unit Testing
• Load Testing
• Performance Analysis
• Automated Build

Answer 6

For what it's worth, Perforce is a potential option if you truly stick to 1 or 2 users. Current perforce docs says you have have 2 users and 5 clients without having to start purchasing licenses.

You might have reasons to switch to perforce depending on your workflow and if you have need of branching the way perforce does it. Not being overly familar with some the other products mentioned here, I can't tell you how perforce compares in the feature department for things like branching, etc.

It is speedy, and it's been rock solid for us (300+ developers on a 10+ year old codebase). We store several T of info and it's been quite responsive. With a small number of users, I doubt that you'd experience many performance troubles assuming you had good hardware for your server.

Having used VSS before, I believe that you can get so many benefits out of a better SCM system that switching should be considered regardless of whether you have corruption or not. Branching alone might be worth it for you. A true client/server model, better interfaces (programmatically and command line) are a couple of other things that could really help just improve your workflow and help somewhat with productivity.

In summary, my view of Perforce is:

• It's fast and quite reliable
• Plenty of cross platform client tools (windows, unix, mac, etc)
• it's free for 2 users and 5 clients
• Integrates into developer studio (and other tools)
• Has a powerful branching system (that might or might not be right for you).
• Has several scriptable interfaces (python, perl, ruby, C++)

Certainly YMMV -- I only offer this alternative up as something that might be worthwhile looking into.