ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Although they label it "revolutionary" I don't see any compelling reasons to switch. Certainly some cool stuff though. We use CVSNT at work since we do both .NET and Java, thus we are able to leverage the application knowledge on both platforms (Windows and *nix).

I have been looking at Subversion, which is an open source project billed as "A compelling replacement for CVS." It already has a VS.NET integration project underway, too. http://www.cvsnt.org/wiki/

We shall see!

Correction: there is SCC support.

I dont know about you guys, but THIS:

::No VS.Net integration. This is more like the CVS model (edit-merge-continue)

Disqualifies it for me. I want checkouts to be done from within the IDE. I want my "open solution from source control" and stuff like this IN The ide.

fabrice: where is there scc supprt? in accurev?

Subversion is all HTTP-based, and is free. I've been using it for about 6 months and have had no troubles with it. It runs cross platform. The shell extension project called TortiseSVN (based on TortiseCVS) is very cool. In general I would prefer shell integration over IDE integration. A SCC provider for subversion is on the way (called subway http://nidaros.homedns.org/subway/) but I haven't seen much progress on it. I offered to help the guy that was working on this but he said it was all C++ (not really my bag) and I would have to sign an NDA from Microsoft. I got scared off. Anyone who is dissatisfied with VSS (anyone _not_ dissatisfied with it) should check out Subversion. Before I used subversion I used CVSNT for about a year. It was fine - it just worked, but I liked Subversion better.

The only feature that I saw in the screen shots that you linked to that I haven't seen before was the stream browser, and just quickly looking at it I wasn't even sure what that did.

I should also point out that my use of these non-VSS version control systems has all been in my home environment (altho I did use CVSNT on site once when there was no other version control system being used) so my repository size has never gotten that large, and I have never run into any contention issues. Under these circumstances even VSS might perform adequately.

not to be a biggot -- but a java app? No thanks...

We've been using Accurev for over a month, and I don't want to go back. If you have one or two developers per project, then Accurev isn't for you. Or if you use SourceSafe just for a backup model to allow you to go back to previous versions, then Accurev isn't for you. But if you have 5 or more developers, or lots of projects that share various versions of code, this is absolutely the best product I've ever seen.

Accurev works on entire trees of source code, so the check-in, check-out model is really not needed. You make modifications to a personal stream of code, then you promote those changes up the hiearchy of streams until you get the changes to the build or integration stream. Every developer can have his own stream to make changes. After the changes have been unit tested we promote them to integration where every three weeks we do a build from a milestone stream. It really is quite a revolutionary way of looking at source control. It really doesn't do justice to call it source control as much as it is project code management and versioning system.

As for the integration, I've turned off SCC in VS and things are so much faster now. I use the Accurev interface to do all the promotions. Yes it's a java app, and it's one of the better ones I've worked with (but that's not saying much). The GUI has a few glitches, but one of the nice things about a new app is getting to drive the way it works.

This is a vendor post, and I've donned my flame vest. :-) I'm not sure where the "no support for .NET" came from. We absolutely support the SCC integration. Regarding Java, it is only for the presentation layer. We use straight C for everything else including local filesystem interaction. On Windows, we compile the Java code and Linux will soon follow. We really only use Java for its cross-platform support of Windows look and feel, nothing more.

It is pretty much impossible to put the "why" of AccuRev's revolutionary nature into words or pictures, it has to be seen in action. One poster noted that the Stream Browser was the only thing that seemed different and in fact that is the easiest place to see where we are different. We allow you to reparent whole branches at will via drag and drop. One of the best ways to see this difference is in our about-to-be-released flash demo: http://www.accurev.com/download/accurev_demo.exe

Kelly, thanks for the kind words. Roy, thanks for mentioning us.

Not used to that url yet. :-) Correct url for the flash is: http://www.accurev.com/download/demo/accurev_demo.exe

Streams? Seems like a lot of extra work. We have had great luck with CVSNT, it's a no-brainer. SCC integration and Shell Integration. It has a COM based extension model and reliable atomic transactions. No crazy databases and you branch when you want to.

This new version control system seems to be selling eye-candy more than anything.

Try out CVSNT before anything else.