Subversion
I’ve talked about Subversion a few times in the past. For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in it and I’ve always wanted to deploy it for daily use. I think I got pretty close to doing so during my final months with Timmons Group. I can remember the tech support guy dodging that request because since it was open source he couldn’t pick up the phone for support if we had any problems. I wonder what Microsoft would have told him if he called them about support for Visual Source Safe 6.0d…
When I made the move to CapTech they were coming off of Subversion and moving to Team Foundation Server. I personally loved TFS. Not all of the Microsoft team agreed, but I never had an issue with it. The best feature I saw, besides the raw source management, was the integration of work items. I could easily associate a changeset with a bug or work item that my business analyst had created. That was seamless integration.
One of the first decisions I had to make at Richmond.com was with source control management. They too had a Source Safe 6.0d deployment. I decided at the time to make use of Visual Source Safe 2005 and its HTTP capabilities. I thought about Subversion then, but decided against it because of the lack of integration with Visual Studio. If Source Safe does anything well, it’s integration with Visual Studio. At the time, the Richmond.com development team was pretty stationary. By that, I mean everyone had desktops and access was pretty limited. Since then, we’ve expanded a bit, and in the process have enabled our team to be more mobile. For the most part, we’ve moved to laptops. We’ve also recently installed a new T1 line into the office and enabled VPN access at the same time. Suddenly our working environment has changed and we’ve become much more flexible in how we do our jobs.
With all of the changes, my hopes had been source control access from home via the VPN. As I tested it for the first time, I happily could access the network machines and database servers. However, when I went to work with Source Safe through Visual Studio, it just wouldn’t work. I think that was about the breaking point. I’ve always wanted to use Subversion and we needed a solution that was designed with a distributed workforce in mind. Not to mention the stability over Source Safe’s wonderful reputation.
Today we made that switch. We have a set of Subversion repositories setup on our development environment that give us access from anywhere by way of the VPN. No longer do I need to head to the office at all hours of the night because of a parser failure or a random bug in the code. Once I write a script for automatic backup of the repositories, I’ll be able to sleep peacefully. 
