Versioning in Visual Studio 2010?

Question

After a few searches on the SO, Google, and MSDN forums, I was disappointed that there was so little information about what might seem obvious, and perhaps a dumb question.

I need to use the source control in Visual Studio 2010 Professional. I do not have a separate Team Foundation Server 2010. Have some people mentioned SourceSafe? I have not seen a single SourceSafe inside Visual Studio 2010, to be honest.

What are the alternatives (preferably free) for version control in Visual Studio 2010? Or is it already integrated into Visual Studio 2010 that I'm so blind that I missed it?

Update # 1: Thanks everyone, I will go with SVN, in particular AnkhSVN for Visual Studio 2010.

Update 3/23/2011 . Almost a year has passed since I asked this question. I highly recommend using Mercurial or Git for Subversion. Thus, for those of you who are looking for a version control system for Visual Studio 2010, look no further than Git or Mercurial extensions from the Visual Studio extension library.

Update 5/16/2013 : now I highly recommend that you use Git on top of Mercurial, TFS, or SVN. Take a look at Try GitHub in a browser to see how awesome it is!

• Getting Started with Git on Visual Studio 2012 - Andy Lewis’s in-depth tutorial.

• Visual Studio Tools for Git - An extension for Team Explorer to provide version control integration for Git. Enables integration with local Git repositories and provides tools for working with remote repositories.

Answer 1

See: List of version control systems with Visual Studio plugins

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Visual Studio is just an IDE. You can use any version control solution you want with it. Any open source source control solution, in particular git, mercury (hg) or disruptive (svn). And there are commercial products like Perforce or SourceGear Vault. See here for an exhaustive list and google for more information.

You can find Visual Studio plugins that integrate it with any control. Open source subversion is particularly important in this regard. Commercial usually come with this integration.

And if you are not using the original control, which requires that you explicitly check the files to edit them (for example, VSS or TFS), IDE integration is not even needed. I personally prefer to use git or subversion from outside the IDE.

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And please stay as far away as possible from Visual SourceSafe .

Answer 2

I use Ankh SVN along with Subversion on the server side and it works great for me. Mercurial and Git are more popular than SVN recently, although there is also Visual HG , the Mercurial plugin for Visual Studio.

Edit: Meanwhile, I switched to Mercurial (Tortoise HG plus Visual HG) and never looked back. It will take several hours to get used to Mercurial if you came from Subversion, but after that it is a really easy breeze. Even if you don't need distributed CVS, Mercurial still has many nice features that are not available in Tortoise SVN. In addition, it looks pretty stable, especially regarding branching.

Answer 3

As @Tomek suggested using Subversion.

Check out this post to help you use subversion and AnkhSVN (VS plugin) with VS2010

Visual Studio 2010 Subversion with AnkhSVN

Answer 4

Let me add another option to the list of SCMs integrated with Visual Studio 2010: Plastic SCM . You can check how it looks here .

Community Edition is available there.

Answer 5

I have used Subversion and Mecurial for projects, and both of them made me remember that I work with very hateful (for good reason) Visual Source Safe. Both will "work", but both will show their unix-programmer roots (no pun intended) with cryptic error messages and dumb, black magic. Source control should be simple, reliable and stay away. Neither SNV nor Mecurial are suitable. Mecurial is easier to use if nothing happens - approximately 80% of the time.

If you work only one developer, I would use Mercurial.

Here is an example of why I hate them:

clicking on Z: \ Repos \ SupplierAdminWebRepo searching for changes new remote heads on the default branch [Error: abort: push creates a new remote head 9cfbad6249a9!] new remote control 9cfbad6249a9 [Error: (did you forget to merge? Use push -f to to force)]

[Operation completed. Release Code: 255]