Brennan’s Blog

I have become a fan of Subversion. For years I have used CVS for version control, but Subversion is now recognized as the logical next step for CVS. Subversion is a close cousin to CVS with many of the exact same features, but some of the classic problems with CVS were resolved with Subversion. It also leverages Apache 2.0 and WebDAV which has been around a while and is integrated with many applications, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.

I had set up Subversion on FreeBSD but this week I set it up on Windows and I was surprised how easy it was to do and how well it integrates with Windows. I followed the instructions at Subersionary.org. I simply had to install Apache 2 first and then Subversion which detects Apache 2 and places the SVN modules in the Apache 2 modules folder. Then I just had to initialize a folder for a Subversion project and configure Apache to use it. There was no extra work which I appreciate after doing the FreeBSD installation.

And once it was in place I set up Windows authentication so that users who already have accounts on the domain can get into the Subversion repository. It was quite impressive.

A great client for Subversion (SVN) which integrates directly with Windows Explorer is TortoiseSVN. With it you can browse a SVN repository and manage files directly with Windows Explorer. This is ideal for files which are not a part of a software development project. Regular users can use it to manage media files which is perfect with Subversion which was designed to handle binary files. Microsoft Sharepoint provides file management versioning in a similar way. Subversion could be used as an low cost alternative to Sharepoint.

And for Visual Studio you can use AnkhSVN. It supports VS.NET 2003 but to make it work with VS.NET 2005 you must use a specific version. I expect once VS.NET 2005 is officially released this month there will be an official release for VS.NET 2005.