Subversion Client for Visual Studio

Beepcake · 19 Jun 2008 at 16:18

Does anyone know of a half decent client for subversion that integrates into Visual Studio? I've got Tortoise installed so I can do everything from explorer without too many issues (although the merge tool is a bit clunky), but I'd like something that integrated properly.

I've tried quite a few and they all seem to bugged to hell

Anyone use one they can recommend?

Inquisitor · 19 Jun 2008 at 16:23

You may already have tried it but AnkhSVN is supposedly fairly good.

growse · 19 Jun 2008 at 16:41

I've never got anything working properly. Gave up trying in the end

Dj_Jestar · 19 Jun 2008 at 17:17

My colleagues all stuck with Tortoise. I don't use VS, so can't help

Beepcake · 19 Jun 2008 at 17:36

Inquisitor said:
You may already have tried it but AnkhSVN is supposedly fairly good.

I've given it a go, and it looks promising, but it looks a long way from being production ready. Even testing it with 2 people on a small project cocked up several times in the space of an hour or so

It's a shame most source control providers are so expensive, and it's also a shame there's no easy way to provide a source control plugin in .net or i'd knock my own up

dan0r2 · 19 Jun 2008 at 20:12

Hi

I was in the same position at the start of the year. In the end we went with VisualSVN.

http://www.visualsvn.com/

Its a front end to tortoisesvn and worth the money. Had 0 problems after 6 months use.

Beepcake · 19 Jun 2008 at 20:43

dan0r2 said:
Hi

I was in the same position at the start of the year. In the end we went with VisualSVN.

http://www.visualsvn.com/

Its a front end to tortoisesvn and worth the money. Had 0 problems after 6 months use.

I've taken a look at it, but for the money they charge I'd expect a "proper" source control provider rather than a bolt on addin.. especially when all the hardwork is done by a free command line utility. There's a couple of other commercial frontends for Tortoise that do similar things, I'm not quite sure why they charge quite a lot per head for a front end :confused:

dan0r2 · 19 Jun 2008 at 22:13

£25 a head is peanuts considering the functionality it provides and time we save using it.

I couldn't find anything close to VisualSVN for acting as a VS subversion client.

The fact it uses tortoisesvn is a huge advantage in that your using a single svn client for VS and explorer.

Give the trial and go.

Be interested to know what you do go with in the end. Great to see you've gone for subversion though - great piece of software.

Gman · 19 Jun 2008 at 22:30

Theres a plugin for visual studio that add the tortoise actions to the toolbar i think

Beepcake · 20 Jun 2008 at 06:43

Gman said:
Theres a plugin for visual studio that add the tortoise actions to the toolbar i think

There's a preferences file, that's what i'm using at the moment. Seems to do the job as well as some of the proper plugins, but it's lacking things such as Merge as an option which is a little bizarre.

Beepcake · 20 Jun 2008 at 06:45

dan0r2 said:
£25 a head is peanuts considering the functionality it provides and time we save using it.

I couldn't find anything close to VisualSVN for acting as a VS subversion client.

The fact it uses tortoisesvn is a huge advantage in that your using a single svn client for VS and explorer.

Give the trial and go.

Be interested to know what you do go with in the end. Great to see you've gone for subversion though - great piece of software.

£25 a head isn't much, but it's hard to justify when there's already licenses for VSS and the main bit of the software is actually free

I'm going to try and find time to play around with Anhk again today, I'll grab the source and see how much work would be involved with fixing some of the initial problems myself.

Augmented · 20 Jun 2008 at 13:30

Beepcake said:
it's hard to justify when there's already licenses for VSS

Anything can be justified when it comes to VSS. Nobody should ever have to suffer it!

I also just use TortoiseSVN from Explorer. Can't really see any major benefit from having the VS integration, as everything's only a click away (just in a separate window).

elkdanger · 20 Jun 2008 at 14:59

Another vote for VisualSVN here - well worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

One big advantage that it does give you over using Tortoise from the explorer is that it takes care of keeping the repository in sync when renaming, deleting, moving and copying files, without having to work with the interface differently. With Tortoise, you have to take care of which commands you use when, and be wary of how to properly move and copy files to and from different folders. It makes a difference when you bring new developers onto a project where they might not have worked with Subversion before - I don't know how many corrupt repositories we've had because of Tortoise's sometimes 'windows unfriendly' approach.

Anyway, it just breaks the workflow slightly when you have to come out of VS, do all your Subversion stuff, making sure you're not cacking anything up - much prefer to do it from within VS.

Beepcake · 20 Jun 2008 at 17:04

Right, I think I have a decent enough system that can handle everything I need.. it's basically a combo of:

Tortoise
Ankh 1.0.3 (Same as 1.0.2 but registers with 2008 too)
SourceGear Diff Merge

All hanging together with a custom installer that sets up Tortoise and Ankh to use the external diff/merge tool and sets them both to use _svn.

It all sits in a nicely installable package with the vast majority of tasks possible in Visual Studio (editing, committing, . Anything "extra" such as creating branches etc can be done with Tortoise and Ankh stays nicely in sync.

topbanana · 20 Jun 2008 at 21:29

VisualSvn is very good, another vote from me.