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....