Alternatives to SourceSafe
October 7th, 2004It seems I can never escape the clutches of Visual SourceSafe. I escaped it once but suddenly on a new assignment I am neck deep in it again. So I have come up with my top 3 alternatives to VSS.
Subversion
The repository is Subversion, a branched cousin of CVS which adds a couple of features such as atomic commits and a binary repository supposedly for faster access.
And in VS.NET you can use a plugin to talk to the Subversion repository.
Before Subway and Subversion there was a CVS plugin called Igloo which was not all that great.
And then there is a nice commercial version from SourceGear which provides two products: Source Offsite and Source Vault.
The Vault product is written entirely in .NET/C# so it will run in any CLR. SourceGear actually contracted Ximian (now owned by Novell) to port the Mono runtime to various Unix platforms so the SourceGear Vault product could be run on Unix and Windows as many of their clients would want.
All in all, I would like to have a completed CVS plugin as I feel most comfortable with the long history that CVS has had and the many CVS related software which is out there. There is also the fact that the Subversion repository is binary data, not text diffs like CVS. And if I could easily convince the client to fork out the cash for the SourceGear products I would do that. I will be giving each of these a closer look.
