Visual Studio Integration with Free SCM

Question

I am looking for alternatives to TFS for source code management. I worked with CVS and SVN. I know GIT and Mercurial, but I still haven't worked with them.

I would like to use any of them integrated with Visual Studio with the same ease as using TFS (Solution Explorer context menu, pluggable source explorer, etc.).

Do you know about free plugins?

Answer 1

I would suggest using Mercurial.

With visual studio there is a free plugin http://visualhg.codeplex.com/ .

In addition, there is a Windows shell package that you can install called tortiseHG, which makes it very easy to work with Mercurial in windows. http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/

There are other plugins that you can use for SVN and GIT.

For GIT, you can use msysGIT, which again has good shell integration capabilities: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

Like the visual studio extensions http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

For SVN, there is AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

If you have not used a lot of SCM, I highly recommend trying Mercurial. Distributed SCM quickly become the best way to deal with the source. This is just the right way to do something.

Here are a few resources to help you get started if you are interested in Mercurial:

An excellent tutorial by Joel Spolsky: http://hginit.com/

Careful coverage of Mercurial features: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

The best happiness.

Answer 2

I use Mercurial with TortoiseHg , which provides context menus and explorer status icons, and VisualHG , which provides Visual Studio and integration.

The integration level with Visual Studio is not as smooth as the integration level that you get with TFS, combined with each other they create a very productive work environment. In fact, in some areas, I prefer TFS integration integration - in particular, I find the TFS Explorer to be quite cumbersome because it requires a VS instance to run. In contrast, the TortoiseHg research repository is very easy and quick to get started.

Answer 3

I am using Git Extesions . It has beautiful gui windows and a visual studio plugin. It works with cygwiin and msysgit.

Answer 4

I used the "AnkhSVN" ( http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/ ) plugin to access SVN. Worked like a charm :)

Answer 5

I have not done much with GIT at the moment, but if you are familiar with SVN and work under Windows, you may already have found TortoiseSVN. I recommend trying TortoiseGIT .

In fact, I do not see the need for tight integration in MS Visual Studio. I am currently working with Access and (shame on me) Visual Basic 6, and there is no integration with Subversion at all. Checking / logging out, viewing logs, forking and much more work very well with TortoiseSVN.

The last time I used this integration was Visual SourceForge, which by default provides file locks. This required a good integration. Since SVN and GIT do not provide blocking in the first place, I prefer to use a standalone client.

Answer 6

If you use Tortoise SVN and Visual Studio, I highly recommend the VisualSVN Visual Studio plugin. It is not free, but it costs money.