Sep 19 2008
Visual Studio & SVN integration
SVN is nowadays one of the most popular version control systems. There is a great tool for Windows called TortoiseSVN – it is very popular, easy to use and has a lot of features. But… it is not very convenient while developing. The need to switch from Visual Studio just to check-in, resolve conflicts… well it is definitely not what I want. I wanted to have a tool that integrates with Visual Studio just like Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe or TFS does. Quite a while ago I tried AnkhSVN, but it didn’t work as good as I wanted – it had a heavy impact on my Visual Studio (sometimes I had to wait very long to be able to do anything – because VS tended to freeze).
Few months ago I found out that many people praise VisualSVN. It is not a plugin (just like the old AnkhSVN) – it uses SCC interface, so it behaves just like VSS/TFS. Some people says that the only thing they dislike is that they feel it just a wrapper for TortoiseSVN (VisualSVN just launches TortoiseSVN’s dialogs for most of the operations). I think it is not a disadvantage – TortoiseSVN is a great client, so if there is a way to use not, and not be forced to switch from Visual Studio to Explorer / Total Commander / any other shell… that’s just great (for me). The only disadvantage of VisuaSVN is that one have to pay for it. In the past it was very cheap (19$) but after gaining popularity it became much more expensive – now it costs 50$ (but there is a way to get it for free – one just have to be active developer involved in open source project).
Well… I wanted to find a free alternative, and that’s how I found Garry Bodsworth’s special settings, that integrates TortoiseSVN with Visual Studio. It is free. It is fast (there is no impact on Visual Studio performance). It contains both: version for VS2008 and VS2005. Perfect? Well… almost ;) It is just a setting file, so ‘Pending Checkins’ won’t work, there is no mechanism showing new files or changed files in projects / solutions…
All those things that Garry’s settings lacks are provided by the latest, totally rewritten version of AnkhSVN! Now AnkhSVN works not as a plugin, but as SCC package – the integration is done the way it should be. The impact on Visual Studio performance is not noticeable. ‘Pending Checkins’ works just like with VSS / TFS, managing newly added, changed or deleted files in solutions / projects is much simpler – thanks to showing all the changes right in the solution view. Personally I think that TortoiseSVN’s dialogs are better ;) so at the moment I am using both – Garry’s settings and AnkhSVN. Garry’s settings allows me to use very well known by me mechanisms provided by TortoiseSVN, and AnkhSVN shows me all the changes I have made recently – it saves me a lot of time, and I am sure I won’t miss any file while doing heck-in.
