Affordable Source Code Control For Visual Studio

I bit the bullet and picked up a copy of Visual Studio 2005 a few weeks ago. Most of my development is done in Eclipse, which has great source code control integration with CVS and Subversion. Outside of Eclipse, I tend to use command line systems (darcs being my personal favourite for cross-platform and simplicity) for the most part. I have to admit that I'm a huge fan of Superversion though, so if you're looking for a dead simple system I can't recommend it enough if command lines and IDE integrations aren't that high on your list of priorities.

Anyway, source code control in VS depends on the SCCI interface. Do some searching and you'll find that there are quite a few source code control systems that use this interface, including

• ionForge's evolution;
• Perforce;
• Sourcegear's Vault;
  
• etc.

The three listed above all offer free single-user licenses, and are well worth a look. You'll find plenty of other possibilities out there as well, but I'm interested in affordable/free solutions. Most of the rest tend to be on the "they want how much?!?" side.

I really wanted to use Subversion or CVS if I could, simply because as free products I can use them both at home and at work. I really don't want to learn 10 different SCMs and/or shell out for something for work. One Solution To Rule Them All and all that.

For Subversion there are really two solutions for Visual Studio integration: AnkhSVN and VisualSVN. I haven't tried VisualSVN, but I did use AnkhSVN for a week or two and while it worked as advertised it did seem to slow Visual Studio down perceptibly. I've since seen anecdotal evidence that suggests that it's because AnkhSVN is structured not as a SCCI provider but as a plugin. Can't confirm that, though.

I really wanted Quma Software's QVCS to work. Out of all the commercial offerings it was the most reasonably priced for the solo developer and appeared to be the most straightforward to use. I was able to install the trial version and use it as a separate client without any trouble, however I could never get it to work in Visual Studio. It would be recognized as a valid SCC plugin, but would report an error every time I tried to check in a sample project.

Serious web scraping ultimately led me to the TamTam CVS plugin. It sits atop a CVSNT installation and plugs directly in to VS.NET. I've been using it for a few hours now and it seems to work as advertised with no perceptible Visual Studio slowdown. The initial documentation on getting set up could be a little clearer, but once you get it up and running it's essentially a seamless part of Visual Studio living. Considering it's only $10, it's probably worth your time to take a closer look. Ultimately I've decided to go this route as the best combination of price and ease of use.

One final note: my favourite Windows text editor Zeus actually comes with its own CVS-SCC source code control system. Although it works great within Zeus and it does register as a potential SCC source code system in Visual Studio, I wasn't actually able to get it to work. Which is to be expected, according to a post by Zeus' author.