Peach at Microsoft Store

Question

Our dev store is currently using Visual SourceSafe. We all know how this can end (badly), so we are exploring other systems. First up is Perforce. Does anyone have experience using and integrating in Visual Studio (2003/2005/2008)? How good is it, like any other, or is it pretty durable with good features, comparatively?

Answer 1

I have used Perforce in my last three assignments (my current job I use Subversion, which I dislike almost the same.) I am a big fan of Perforce, and going from SourceSafe will be like Nirvana, Just getting an atomic check would be a big incentive for your company. Otherwise, Perforce is fast, it has good tools, and the workflow is simple for tasks such as mergers and integrations. I recommend it with all my heart. It may not be all new and bright, like the last widespread VCS, but, frankly, I prefer the client-server model for its speed, especially if you work with people from other countries who may have slow connections to you.

Visual Studio integration is pretty good, but it has some annoying issues. If you start another Perforce client (for example, P4V) at the same time, it very poorly tracks changes from another client in synchronization, showing which files are currently being scanned. Usually you need to close Visual Studio and load the project again if you want it to sync correctly. But the synchronization status does not actually affect the correctness of the checks / checks / updates, it just means that you can be fooled if you think that something is in a different state than in reality while you are in Visual Studio. Perforce customers will always show the correct status as they are constantly in sync with the database.

In addition, sometimes you find that you need to work "offline" (for some reason it’s not connected to the Perforce database), and when you download the project again, your Perforce bindings may be lost and you will have to rebuild each project separately. If you are working with a solution that contains many projects, this can be a big pain in patoot. The same thing happens when you first test a solution; binding to Perforce is necessary before integration happens.

Answer 2

We've been using Perforce for over a year before switching to SVN recently. Although I liked the tools (like visual diff and merge and admin bits), we had some very tedious binding problems, as Chris mentions; otherwise, VS integration is satisfactory. In any case, I believe that working with SVN is simpler and more intuitive than Perforce. TortoiseSVN (a Windows Explorer shell extension) is great, and we bought a couple of VisualSVN licenses for VS integration. Unlike Perforce, VisualSVN does not work with the MS SCC interface, but rather directly with the SVN client, which I personally see as an advantage. Perforce has support for many other operating systems, but our non-Windows developers feel more comfortable with SVN. If I had to choose again, I would stick to SVN.

Answer 3

It's hard to call $ 900 per user a good feature .

Answer 4

SourceGear Vault is the best SCM for migrating VSS users.

And its cheap.

Answer 5

Perforce works great with Visual Studio, including the "stand-alone" mode, in which VS will make your local files available for recording and synchronizing with the server later.

I try to use the Perforce GUI for many operations (submits, different) just because it is faster / better, but the IDE verification process is fully verified.

Perforce in my experience is rock solid and the best mixed (code + data) version control product, if their cost is not a factor.

My biggest problem is that the server performance under Windows is not where it is as good as * nix, and if you use the * nix server, they do not officially support the case-insensitive file names (this means that you either refuse support related to file system errors or configure a trigger that prevents people from adding foo.cpp if Foo.cpp exists).

Another main compiler is that for some general operations you need to return to the command line, often connecting the connection functions. One example would be to get a list of files in a directory that is not under source control.

Both of these are issues that reflect the company more than the product. IMO Perforce knows that they are at the top of the market and therefore see no reason to invest in fixing such things.

Answer 6

I have experience using a derivative of Perforce.

It seemed difficult to manage from an administrator’s point of view, but it was good to use it from a programmer’s point of view.

Then again, I do a great job of command line version control, so I can't talk about VS integration.

Answer 7

I used it personally and managed several teams over the years that Perforce and Visual Studio did. It works great. There may be a pair of getchas bindings / bindings, but they are usually easy to parse - the Perforce basebase and / or mailing list is a good source of information.

There have never been problems using the command line, visual clients and VS IDe at the same time - the update works fine.

Answer 8

We make extensive use of perforce in the company, including branching for very large projects, development on Sun Solaris and Windows, and more than 120 users.

It is very fast and the Windows GUI (P4V) is very nice. Explorer integration is acceptable. I disabled VS integration and used macros (e.g. p4 edit ) to edit / reverse / diff files. VS integration is extremely annoying for large projects (our solution has> 130 projects), but can work for small projects.

Answer 9

I did not use Perforce, but I found the transition to Team Foundation Server as one of the best options when working with Visual Studio.