Mischa Kroon

Prelude

This will hopefully be the start of a series of posts / articles about the basic information/skills needed for different software development.

Source Control

Source control is one of the things you need to set up before starting to do the actual development.

Before creating things of value it's wise to make sure that your investment is guarded.

Source control is there for this need.
Not only can it be used to keep your source code and files safe but it will also allow you to keep different revisions of files available so you can revert to any other version of the files.

This can be great for going back to the way things worked in version x or the way things looked in version y.

More information on Source control / Revision control.

Source Control: Tutorials / Lingo

Since this is very nicely explained by others I will just link to some tutorials by others:

• Source Control Howto
• A Visual Guide to Version Control

Different Source Control providers

There are a lot of different source control system a brief overview:

• Visual Sourcesafe: free solution by Microsoft, this one is not really recommended by most people
• Sourcegear Vault: commercial solution created by Sourcegear to be Sourcesafe done right.
• SVN: Free open source source control and the default Source Control solution nowadays
• Git: The new source control kid on the block

For me the most interesting source control solutions at the moment are:
SVN / Git

So I will go into these options some more but first lets have a look at a comparison between SVN and Git.

SVN

How to set it up on windows.
How to use it on a daily basis.
A free book about SVN.

Git

Daily usage of Git.
Git commit policies.

Source control hosting options

If you want to get started with source control but you don't want to take ages to set up a server and things like that there is also the option, for going for a hosted option.

There are a lot of different hosting options for SVN, there are also a lot of options coming up for Git hosting.

Some are free others aren't the ones I've tried:

Unfuddle
Assembla
Springloops

And all looked well.

Here is also a comparsion list of different Source control hosters.

Conclusion

Source Control should be the first thing you think of before starting to develop, with this article I hope to have given the readers a head start on how to go about actually using it in a correct way and getting started.