Code Repositories

Over lunch the other day, some collegues and I were jawing about different code repositories that we've used, and how clients/projects that we've worked with have evolved to use different VC products.  At one point, all six of us had worked together on a big (successful) online wallet system.  It was originally on Perforce.  We migrated the whole system to Subversion because we were having problems managing code/library dependencies between various projects.  Things worked great in Subversion for what we were doing at the time (this was 4 years ago or so).  One of the developers I worked with there was on the team for Monotone - a precurser of Mercurial - in that they both followed the distributed versioning system model.
In the last year we made the change from ClearCase to Subversion, and for what we were doing it just felt (and continues to feel) so much better.
A couple of guys that were eating with us at lunch are working with a client that switched from Subversion to Mercurial earlier this year.  They said it was a bit of a paradigm shift for all the developers in the organization as you have to think about how you manage your changes a little bit differently.  One of the guys also forwarded me this article that is really good at explaining the differences (and has a link to a tutorial the author wrote).

Tools for working with SVN & Visual Studio

We're moving to Subversion as our code repo. Tools that we are using are:
- VisualSVN Server on the server box for maintaining the svn server (managing users, creating/importing new repos, etc)
- TortoiseSVN on client boxes. This works in conjunction with windows explorer to tell you the status of files in your local copy of the repo. We've found that the icons don't change status immediately - you need to be patient with them.
- Collabnet AnkhSVN - Subversion plug-in for visual studio. Allows you to see the status and check files in and out inside of VS.
- Collabnet SVN command line client. We found we needed this (particularly svn.exe in the PATH environment variable) if we wanted to run the SVN steps in a Visual Build file.