Brennan’s Blog

It seems there is a growing movement toward Subversion among .NET developers. Last month Scott Hanselman and Jay Flowers did a demo of CI Factory on dnrTV. The source control system for the demo was Subversion and they interacted with it using the TortoiseSVN client which snaps into Windows Explorer. I believe it piqued the interest of many .NET developers. Last week the Subsonic project left CodePlex due to issues with the source control aspects of Team Foundation Server (TFS). Apparently Rob Conery was losing key team members because of the problems.

This leads me to believe there is momentum heading to Subversion and away from TFS. To counteract the trend Microsoft has leaked some information about preparations to release Subversion on CodePlex starting June 5. It is not clear exactly what that means. It seems to suggest that it is just a bridge to TFS and not actual Subversion hosting. This bridge emulates all of the protocols used to communicate with a Subversion server but internally it uses TFS. The goal is to allow developers to use tools like TortoiseSVN which is a snap-in for Windows Explorer.

I personally host my projects using my own Subversion server along with Trac to manage changes. A while back I wrote about the contrast between CodePlex and Trac and sent the link to the CodePlex team. I am sure I am not the only one hoping to see these kind of improvements at CodePlex. It is clear they are responding to the community, and they are doing so in a very timely way.

[ Update: The release of the bridge has been pushed back a couple of weeks to give them more time for testing and bug fixing. It seems they are seeing more interest than they originally anticipated. ]