I'll be on the Source Control Panel on February 19, 2008 18:00

The Cincinnati User's Group (Cinnug) has asked me to be a part of the "Source Control Panel" they are having on Tuesday February 19, 2008 at 1800.

This meeting is different then those I've been in before. It's an open panel for group members to come and ask questions about VSS, TFS, Harvest, ClearCase, Vault and Subversion.

I'll be there primarily as a Subversion resource, but I'll try to fill in on VSS and TFS where I can.

Short notice I know, but if you're not doing anything Tuesday, come on down an heckle me. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

My Second, "Getting the Most from Version Control" Presentation

Introduction This time I gave a presentation at The Dayton .Net Developers Group. For those that attended, my materials are now available for download. Compared to the first presentation, this one focused on Subversion less, and more on general practices. That was something I feel needed to be improved from the first meeting. For those that attended the first presentation you might want to look at my new materials, I completely overhauled my slide deck. My demos were much less this time, and my last one bombed. But I promised to list the corrected steps here, so stay tuned. What did I learn? A big difference between this demo and last is I didn't use svnserve. TortoiseSVN (TSVN) can use the "file:" protocol to connect to local or UNC repositories. (I found it in "4.1.3. Local Access to the Repository" of the TSVN documentation.) That's great news for those people out there what want to get started quickly, TSVN can do everything you need. There was a request for a demo that involved VS and .NET projects, which I'll be sure to add if I do the presentation again. Final Thought All in all, the feedback was very positive. Thanks to all of you for your kind words, and if you have any comments please list them here, or on the forum at the group's website.

My first, "Getting the Most from Version Control" Presentation

Introduction For those of you who aren’t aware I gave a presentation at the Day of .NET in Ann Arbor MI. My Presentation was titled “Getting the most from Version Control.” I think it went pretty well. There was a wonderful turn out, and a lot of great questions and feedback. I want to thank all of you who attended. I hope you enjoyed my talk and you got something out of it. Please attach your comments about my presentation to this post. I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you thought, and how I could make the presentation better. My presentation materials as available on the Day of .NET website. If you want to try to demo’s out for yourself place start with “Demo\Script.doc” What did I learn from this experience? Confusing sections of my Presentation that I should make clearer.

• Add coder’s (Mike, and Sally) involvement to the “Brief history of time” slide
• Update the abstract to mention a focus on subversion

Ideas for content to be included in the presentation.

• Why programmers should group their changes into small logical changesets.
• How a good version control system can change coding style and make code less bloated.
• Stress the value of commenting commits

During my presentation, I answered a few questions. What is the name of the tools you used in your demo? Subversion (SVN) is the version control system I used to create and host the repository. AnkhSVN is the name of the Visual Studio Add-on. This little open source tool has come a long way, it still has a couple bugs here and there but I’m finding it to be more and more reliable. However I like to keep TortoiseSVN installed as a backup. TortoiseSVN (TSVN) was the windows explorer plug-in is used to perform Adam’s administrative tasks. TortoiseSVN is open source, and has helped me fix any I’ve had with my working copies. AltDesk is the multiple desktop software I used to switch between the screens of Mike, Sally, and Adam. I use AltDesk on a daily basis and would recommend it to anyone interested in multiple desktop software. It’s light weight fast, and flexible. Can Subversion be hosted over a network? Yes, if you want to host SVN over a LAN the easiest way is to use svnserve.exe like I did for my presentation. You can see how this was done in “Demo\Resources\1 Serve Repo.bat”. One nifty trick you can do is set up a “Scheduled Task” to launch svnserve.exe whenever the computer starts, this way someone doesn’t have to be logged in to the server to run svnserve.exe. Another option is to host SVN internet. Apache has great support for this , but my experience in this setup is limited. I work in a team of 5 would you recommend subversion? Yes. In fact, I would recommend subversion even for a team of one. What do I need to setup subversion for myself? At the bare minimum, you will need the Subversion binaries. I have an example of these in demo. Aside from that you can use the more advanced tools listed above.