CVS & .NET Integration
Source Code Control is
an absolute passion of mine. I get physically ill at the mere though of
developing software without it. I could go on for hours about how important it
is to understand and use source control, but I'll save you the pain of reading
it. I'll just say this; If you don't use it, go pound sand. How is
that?
One of my all time
favorite source control systems is CVS (StarBase gets top honors, but at
$6,000,000,000 per seat they don't get my business). The great thing about CVS
is that it is very flexible and completely free. Don't get me wrong, there are
defiantly issues with it, but most of them can be ignored. Especially in the
face of it being "free".
There is however one major issue that has prevented me from
using CVS in the last few years, no IDE integration with Visual Studio. There
were some tools out there like JalindiIgloo, but they just didn't cut
it (really, it flat out doesn't work...).
I could have just used
an external IDE to manage it like WinCvs or TortoiseCVS. But WinCvs offends my UI
sensibilities. It deserves a Life Time Achievement award from the UI Hall Of
Shame. And while I do like TortoiseCVS, it just doesn't feel comfortable to
manage source code from within the Explorer. To CVS wasn't much of an option for
a long time.
Then I found the
"CVS
SCC Proxy" plug-in from PushOK
Software. The basic concept is that the PushOK Proxy 100% mimics Visual
Source Safe. This means that you get all of the integration benefits of Visual
Source Safe with solid support of CVS behind it. Oh, and it is Free as
well.
I cannot over
exaggerate how cool this little tool is. And I cannot tell you how happy I am to
finally be able to use CVS with Visual Studio and not have to handle anything
outside the IDE . The best part is that I
can now intergrate
my FogBugs database with my
source control.
I've tested this
product with Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Basic 6.0, and
Visual C++ 6.0. I found no problems using the tool this any of them.
Now if I could only
find an ASP.NET browser for the CVS repository....