Brennan’s Blog

All this time that I have worked with .NET in Visual Studio there has not been a good way to integrate support for CVS or Subversion. For Subversion there was AnkhSVN which attempted to implement an SCC provider for Visual Studio. It never was fully embraced by developers due limitations of what could be done with SCC which was designed to support Visual Source Safe. The SCC interface is also something you must license if you want the full documentation. Bottom line, it is not something Microsoft makes easy to implement.

So it was good see a new add-in called VisualSVN which appears to take care of all of those concerns and implements good support for Subversion in Visual Studio. The FAQ explains that they do not even bother trying to implement an SCC provider.

Currently I just use TortoiseSVN which integrates very well with Windows Explorer. But it is not aware of .NET projects. I have to tell it to ignore user specific files (*.suo, *.user) and the bin and obj output directories. That is not difficult but not having to do that work will save time and lower the baseline for developers who are new to Subversion.

I plan to buy a license ($49 is cheap!) and use it in Visual Studio while I will continue to use TortoiseSVN in Windows Explorer when I do not want to fire up Visual Studio.