Source control system for single developer

Question

What\'s the recommended source control system for a very small team (one developer)?

Price does not matter. Customer would pay :-)
I\'m working on Vista32 with V

Answer 1

I recently moved my studio from Subversion to Perforce and put some notes about it, sort of a postmortem, on my blog here. Hope it's useful.

Answer 2

You can use Vault from SourceGear, the replacement tool for visual studio source safe. The IDE is integrated in Visual Studio.

The tool is free for single user.

More information: http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/index.html

Answer 3

Subversion has very low barrier to entry.

TortoiseSVN is a free client, and integrates into your explorer- i.e. in right mouse click menu.

The repository can be just a directory somewhere on your PC or on a network drive. Backing up just means zipping up this directory

There are a few plugins to Visual studio for Subversion, AnkSvn is one I have used, it is free and integrates nicely (i.e it will be smart about moving and deleting files etc)

Subversion is a good choice for one developer.

Update:

Since this post, I've been using Mercurial. It is a Distributed SVN. The 'distributed' aspect may not be directly useful to a sole developer, however it is better at merging and is somewhat faster. There is also a free and good Windows Explorer extension client - Tortoise Hg.

So in summary, if you are the sort of person who will work on many branches at once (doing spikes etc) or if you work on multiple PCs at once and would like full offline access to checkin history on both, then Mercurial. If you just want simple tracking and a well proven and easy to understand solution, then Subversion.

Answer 4

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Perforce. It's free for 2 people, blazingly fast, and integrates with VS. Also source server has bindings for it by default.

In addition to source control, it really is worthwhile to complete the loop and setup a symbol server and a source server, so that you have simple debugging of anything you've shipped (e.g. no more searching for pdbs or source that match the binary). Both source and symbol server are completely free and supported in VS since 2005.

Answer 5

A number of the posts advocate putting the repository on a server because it provides redundancy. I don't think this is all that helpful for a single user. Using a separate server machine adds a lot of complexity, but it doesn't buy much redundancy: if you lose the server machine, you still have the current sources on your development machine, but you may have lost ALL your history. Putting the repository on a server does make sense if that server is being regularly backed up. Using an exernal hosting service for the repository can provide storage redundancy, but you're at the mercy of the external service AND you need an internet connection to access the repository. If you use an external host, make frequent backups of the repository that you keep control of!

I would presonally recommend TortoiseSVN using a local file based repository. Just make sure you backup the local repository to a second machine or external media (such as CD-ROMs) on a regular basis.

Answer 6

I'd recommend two things:

First up, that other server - what happens if your machine dies? the house burns down? etc. Having it on another machine is a good idea from a redundancy point of view.

The second one is WHAT:

If you are very familiar with visual source(un)safe, think about SourceGearVault. It's VERY nice, very fast, and very much a vastly improved "clone" of VSS (ie works the same way from the users POV, not under the hood). Needs SQL server and windows tho (it's .NET + SQL server). Free for 1 user.

Of you are not, then I suggest you do one of two things:

First, get VisualSVN. It's great, works with VS2008 really well. Second, if you MUST run it locally, get VisualSVN server (free!). Make sure you have a good backup plan. Runs on XP/2003/2008/Vista etc.It's just Apache + SVN, under the hood, so it just saves you on the setup - took me 5 mins to install and have it running.

OR, and I prefer this one:

go somewhere like Unfuddle, Dreamhost etc, and get hosting for SVN. It's private, it's fast, and most of all - it's OFFSITE. My dreamhsot account, with something crazy like 500GB of storage and 1-2TB of transfer/month costs about $6/month! There are others which do SVN hosting + bug tracking etc. Look around.

But yeah - SVN is the schizzzznit.you could create a local repository, but I like having a remote, backed up server.

TFS is total, utter overkill for 1 developer (or <5 IMO)