Yes, I'm considering writing a book: "Kevin Explores Things That Rock".
My company uses Perforce for source control. It works pretty well (although there is no shell integration and the Visual Studio integration is a bit flaky.)
I have my own projects on the side that I'd like to managed with source control. These are both code projects and non-code (poetry, screen plays, other writing) projects. Like I said, anything that I want backed-up, synced and versioned.
If you're like me, you share a set of conflicting tendencies.
- First, a tendency to have many machines that you work on.
- Second, a tendency to be paranoid about keeping important data backed-up and protected with good redundancy.
- Third, a tendency to hate redundancy! This goes along with SPOT. I hate when things get out of sync. I hate having things spread all over a bunch of machines.
Using a source control system helps a lot with this (especially if you're dealing with text-based data formats).
In the world of OSS, Subversion (SVN) is a big player in source management. It's supported by SourceForge. It's used by a mountain of OSS projects. And (drum roll) it has an amazing Windows shell extension: Tortoise.
- Step one: install.
- Step two: make directory somewhere on your machine.
- Step three: right-click and pick "SVN Checkout..."
- Step four: type in the URL of a public SVN repository. There are many out there. Check the list above.
- Step five: laugh at how easy it all is.
Tortoise supports the creation of patches. Renaming and branching. It even has great shell indicators so you know what's checked-in and what's pending check-in. (It works great on XP. So-so on Vista.)
Take a look at TortoiseSVN.
If you're looking for hosting for your SVN repository, check out DreamHost.
Happy Hacking...and don't forget to build an test before you check-in. :-)
5 comments:
You should also check out Google code (code.google.com) it's a great SVN repo for open source projects. I primarily use it for hosting my demo code or other snippets that I want to keep out in the cloud.
Also, if want more "stuff" than source control, check out unfuddle. It's BaseCamp on SVN steroids. ;-)
I think I'm in the same boat as you -- Perforce at work, pondering TortoiseSVN for my own work.
Perforce does have shell integration. Go get a new install of P4Win [1]. It includes P4EXP, their explorer shell extension. Will allow pretty much all of the p4win capabilities from Explorer.
[1] http://www.perforce.com/perforce/downloads/ntx86_64.html#winlist
John
On the downside, if you install TortoiseSVN on Vista, it'll cause Explorer to crash about once every day or two. (Even if you're not using TSVN. It just crashes randomly.)
I built my own version with debugging enabled in the hope of finding out why. This appears to have reduced the frequency of the crashes significantly. It now crashes just once a week. Or, if I run with 'adplus' set up to catch Explorer.exe crashes, it seems to be able to run for over a week without crashing... (I eventually got bored of leaving adplus up all the time, so I've yet to catch it crashing in a way in which I can debug it.)
(On which note, if you or anyone else knows how to make JIT debugging work for Explorer.exe in Vista, I'd love to know. Somehow, the shell seems to opt out of JIT debugging, and just restarts itself automatically without giving me the option to attach a debugger. And it only saves a minidump if I happen not to be connected to the internet at the time of the crash - usually it connects to WER, which tells it not to bother collecting a crash dump...)
If you want to get a crash dump of the explorer process, try DebugDiag. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28bd5941-c458-46f1-b24d-f60151d875a3&displaylang=en
I believe it will set up a service which will attach to the process you want to catch a crash dump for. That way you don't have to leave the application running.
thank you for introducing svn and tortoise svn on my life.. i already liked your wpf blog since before when you were at microsoft, now i thank you for more one tip :). tks. Ratan
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