Adventures in SCM

After a long hiatus, I am resuming work on JTS. JTS is a theater management system that <a href=’http://muvico.com’>Muvico</a> has been using since 2001ish.

2001. That was years ago. Those were the days of ASP and COM+. .NET was still called ASP+. I was still prefixing everything I did with the letter J.

The application now spans all generations of development technologies from ASP to .NET 3.5 SP1. Swell.

The first big effort is to downgrade all of the COM+ to ASP, because ASP is easier to work with these days. The second big effort will be to selectively convert the modules to the IN-DEVELOPMENT JTS 3 API.

I started researching what I can use for SCM. Ideally, I want it to be an online repository so that it doubles as backup service. (I use MOZY, but the client is dreadfully bad. Its almost unusable at this point. They said they’re rewriting it, but we’ll see.)

My googling lead me here http://www.myversioncontrol.com

For $5/month, I get what I need. Its subversion based, which I never used before. The service is excellent and its very generously priced. I have a security concern about it, though. I sent an email and we’ll see what happens. (it never asks for an encryption key. I’d like to keep their eyes out of my code.)

MyVersionControl recommends 2 SVN clients: RAPID SVD and TORTOISE SVN.

I couldn’t get RAPID to do anything. I got a lot of exceptions. I then tried TORTOISE which is a set of windows explorer shell extensions. That worked out pretty well. It took a little getting used to, though. My SCM exposure has been limited to VSS and StarTeam. This subversion stuff is different.

Finally, I tackled VS integration, which ended up being an easy task. I found this product:  http://visualvsn.com. I installed it and started using it. Peace of cake. VisualVSN, like MyVersionControl, offers a 30 day trials.

Everything went well. I spent some time adding some filters to weed out the files that I don’t need to control. I checked everything in. My repository is now 50% full. Now I have 30 days to see if this sense of joy is permanent or fleeting.