VSTS 2008 Power Tools
Nov 20 2008 10:50 PM Filed in: .NET
If there is one category of software developed by
Microsoft that I have never been a fan of, it’s the
source control applications. Visual Source Safe was
just awful, and their newer one, Team System, isn’t
all that much better.
When I first started at Turner, we were using Source Safe on my team. From there we moved over to Star Team, which actually made Source Safe look good. We eventually left Star Team for CVS, which rocked. I like CVS because it is simple to use, and it just works. My favorite feature is using an application like Tortoise CVS, which allows you to do all of your source control from within Windows Explorer. We moved to Subversion from CVS, which is a better version of CVS, so I liked it even more. Once I loaded Tortoise SVN I could use it from Windows Explorer too.
When I started on this Agile project, we moved over to Team System. It’s pretty much like Source Safe, but has some extra features. The main reason we moved over was for its SCRUM and shelving capabilities, two features we never use. It integrates with Visual Studio, but it isn’t the greatest integration. If you have multiple machines you work on, it screws up its whole ‘workspace’ concept. Worst of all, to edit a file you had to fire up Visual Studio and go into the Team Explorer interface and check it out for edit. This sucks when you want to make a simple configuration change. This is where CVS and SVN rocked, you just opened the file in whatever editor you like and edit it. Since it monitors the directory, it picks up the change. Right-click on the file and choose Check-In. It’s that simple.
Well, you can finally do this with Team System, if you go and download their VSTS 2008 Power Tools. The shell integration isn’t installed by default, you have to do a custom install to enable it. After a log-out-log-in you now have VSTS capabilities from within Explorer.
When I first started at Turner, we were using Source Safe on my team. From there we moved over to Star Team, which actually made Source Safe look good. We eventually left Star Team for CVS, which rocked. I like CVS because it is simple to use, and it just works. My favorite feature is using an application like Tortoise CVS, which allows you to do all of your source control from within Windows Explorer. We moved to Subversion from CVS, which is a better version of CVS, so I liked it even more. Once I loaded Tortoise SVN I could use it from Windows Explorer too.
When I started on this Agile project, we moved over to Team System. It’s pretty much like Source Safe, but has some extra features. The main reason we moved over was for its SCRUM and shelving capabilities, two features we never use. It integrates with Visual Studio, but it isn’t the greatest integration. If you have multiple machines you work on, it screws up its whole ‘workspace’ concept. Worst of all, to edit a file you had to fire up Visual Studio and go into the Team Explorer interface and check it out for edit. This sucks when you want to make a simple configuration change. This is where CVS and SVN rocked, you just opened the file in whatever editor you like and edit it. Since it monitors the directory, it picks up the change. Right-click on the file and choose Check-In. It’s that simple.
Well, you can finally do this with Team System, if you go and download their VSTS 2008 Power Tools. The shell integration isn’t installed by default, you have to do a custom install to enable it. After a log-out-log-in you now have VSTS capabilities from within Explorer.
|