VisualSVN, providing seamless and reliable Visual Studio integration for Subversion makes it even more attractable now.
http://www.visualsvn.com/
Source Control: anything but ClearCase is the way I would describe reality. God damn that piece of software.
I have just recently began using source safe at my new company. The place I worked at before used SourceGear Vault. I prefer source safe a LOT more. Vault had so many issues it drove me crazy. I’m not saying sourcesafe is the best, but it’s the best I’ve used. I would be interested in looking at other solutions, though.
The people in my former company were using VSS. When I arrived, I complained about the tool (the UI is a nightmare, it is unstable, it is way too easy to lose data with it and I just hate the echeckout-edit-checkin work style) along with other developers. People were so wary of VSS that they used virtually no SCM at all, preferring good old “one or several backup(s) a day” techniques.
The result is that we switched to subversion + TortoiseSVN, and that people started versioning again. And believe me, we all felt a lot safer.
I’ve been using SourceSafe for about 8 years. Never really had a problem and the integration with VS.NET is sufficient.
But I don’t do branching.
Every product has it’s own unique set of problems.
At a former place of employment, we used VSS.
We replace the icon with a custom one. The VSS icon covered in flames. And the new name? TorchSafe.
It just wasn’t reliable.
I’ve used SourceSafe, Vault and since a few months I’m forced to work with that atrocity called ClearCase. I’m sure it really has all these powerful features and all, but where I work now they use it just like sourcesafe… none of the branching and stream functions are ever used. So you’re basically stuck with a extremely slow sort-of-network-share-for-all-your-sourcecode that happens to do versioning… and hysterical locking.
Of all these tools I still like SourceGear Vault the best. It does branching very well, as well as labelling and it has a great interface which immediately shows you the files that have changed in the repository vs. your local drive… it’s really easy to see who’s checkout what. I love it.
And SourceSafe… ah well… it’s still better (faster) than ClearCase.
ClearCase is a Rational product - 'nuff said.
LOL! I second that. It’s no wonder Rational and Lotus were acquired by IBM; their products’ user interfaces are all so bad it hurts (with few exceptions).
VSS is not 1999 - it’s worse than that, it’s 1993.
Take the “add new files” dialog in VSS. Please, take it. I don’t want it. It’s not 1999 vintage, it’s 1993. It’s windows 3.1 style, and doesn’t play well with long file names at all.
We knew very well by the late 1990s that VSS had serious design problems that will corrupt data every now and again.
I used VSS for years with never a corruption. Unfortunately I am now not able to learn any other source control system.
Always used exclusive checkouts. This works really well if you only have 2 or 3 developers.
Thanks everyone for all the excellent “reviews”.
We are currently using Borland Starteam, and to be really honest: I think it sucks.
Amen to that. We used to have it here, tossed it for subversion. How can a source control system have a status of ‘unknown’? I mean, at the end of the day, isn’t not knowing 180 degrees away from the purpose of a source control system? Bah.
Subversion isn’t perfect, but using it in conjunction with Trac is working out well for our team.
Costs of VSTS and maintenance of Subversion are turns off for upper mgmt. But I’m going to look at Subversion again.
Maintenance of Subversion?
Subversion is not that high maintenance, especially if you’re using FSFS (which is now the default backend), while it’s true that it’s a bit slower than BerkeleyDB, the stability issues and recovery needs get drastically lower.
Now if you want high maintenance cost, try Rational ClearCase: I think that most people who (rightly) bitched about ClearCase had something missing in their experience: ClearCase requires a team of full-time admins to make it work somewhat smoothly. And I’m not joking here.
Anyway, the top picks in centralized version control are SVN and Perforce in my opinion. Haven’t tried SourceGear’s Vault though.
I worked a lot with CVS but moved slowly to Subversion (and SVK). A good move as it solved the majority of drawbacks from CVS I had.
The proprietary Visual SourceSafe is a real pain and must avoid at all cost. RCS is working better than SourceSafe 
The dynamic duo Subversion and SVK (http://svk.elixus.org/) is really efficient.
“I even have theory that MS lost the source code to VSS and that’s why it never gets anything but a button bitmap upgrade.”
Maybe they stored it into Delta or MSVSS? 
I did work with VSS for 2 years, than I had to switch to CVS. At first when I learned there are no exclusive check-outs for source code, I thought “This can’t work, how can it?”. After studying the inner workings of CVS and reading some tutorials I just figured I was blind, and never ever really wished to go back to VSS for no reason (especially not for exclusive checkout and corrupted database). Using WinCVS allowed me to work in easy-to-use GUI and that was it.
Now I’m almost a year working with Subversion, and when we do have some problems with it, it’s usually due to someone not understanding how to work with it properly and raping his own work trying to avoid normal edit-merge-commit workflow. If you have careless programmers who don’t get the idea, there’s probably no good solution, but if your team understands the basic principles, I think the SVN is one of best solutions available. Especially considering the price, but so far on our small projects it gave us everything what we needed and no crash or corruption at all.
BTW TortoiseSVN is a must (I have no experience with SVK). Other free GUI SVN clients are far behind tortoise. For basic check-out/update/commit feel free to try RapidSVN, if you like “commander-like” GUI, but keep the Tortoise around all the time, because when it comes to branching/blaming/restoring/reverting/etc… Tortoise saved my ass many times.
I agree with the downsides to Source Safe. However, I’ve had the misfortune of working with a source control system that is even worse than VSS: JediVCS. It doesn’t support branches. It stores absolute paths in the repository. Really, it’s just awful. I’m amazed that it came in 4th in the survey!
We’ll be migrating to subversion very soon …
Another good book recomendation, with an obvious Perforce bent, but really about how to use source control/software configuration management systems (SCM) in the large is Practical Perforce by Laura Wingerd. I’ve been very pleased with it, and consider it mandatory reading if you’re using Perforce, in order to get the most out of it.
I’ve been using subversion on gentoo linux/apache for 2 1/2 years - berkeley db backend. I must say the maintenance time for it has been minimal. For the first couple of months it took a reasonable amount of my time (I was the guy maintaining it) but once I got used to it and the various issues that can arise any problems became very quickly fixable. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve had to do a svnadmin recover on any of the 7 or 8 repositories we have for at least 6 months at this stage. Admin time is not a big deal for subversion - take the time to learn it and it is trivial to work with. It’s not comparable to the hideous monstrosity that is VSS.
Hi,
IMHO, you are looking at the problem from a wrong side. The problem is not seeing that the system isnt optimal, the problem is that the switching effort is higher than the benefits for most shacks apperently.
You motivated me to write about that btw - so enjoy here:
http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2006/08/22/why-crap-can-rule-the-world/
Best regards
Tam Hanna
I’ve used SS, ClearCase, CVS, SVN, and Perforce, almost exclusively on Windows, developing for non-windows platforms.
SS was okay for our team (~12 developers), but was unreliable, and used lots of space. Artists were pretty unhappy, because SS large binaries don’t play well together.
ClearCase was a nightmare to administrate, we could only do dynamic views (which meant every compile grabbed everything over the network and no offline work). I would never want to go back. We had to use it, because our company had paid for lifetime licenses.
CVS I only used briefly. I found it okay, but a little primitive.
SVN (+ TortoiseSVN) I’m very happy with (but I’m not the admin!). It does everything I want, smoothly, no problems so far. We’re not doing big branching/merging. The weak tags support I didn’t like, but tracking the revision number is almost as good.
Perforce I’ve only used personally, and then in only limited forms. I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen (and friends at my old company (that used to use SS) are also happy with it). It’s reasonably priced, and powerful.
For me, apart from reliability (obvious) things like atomic check-ins, exclusive or not check-outs, and off-line working are non-negotiable.
I’m not tempted to try out MS Team thingy. I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with their whole dev suite (although I only have 2003, not 2005), and don’t see any point in supporting them, if it can be avoided.
I would be curious to hear about people’s experiences with BitKeeper or Alienbrain.
Anyone? Bueller?