Visual Studio integration

[Darcy Casselman]

> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:22 AM, Ian Clatworthy
> <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've spent a few hours today learning Visual Studio from a hard-core
>> Windows developer and getting my head around VSS and Team Foundation
>> Server. I could say a lot but I'll keep it short and polite - ho hum.
>>
>> Are there many VS studio users in the Bazaar community? If so, what are
>> the important things you're looking for in VS integration? Functionality
>> and design wise, is there a "gold standard" source control integration
>> offering (VisualSVN say?) that we ought to meet and exceed?

I helped design and build a Visual Studio integration for a closed
source SCM vendor.  So I have some opinions on these matters.

Microsoft designs its APIs for itself.  The API to integrate source
control for Visual Studio is written with Team Foundation Server in
mind, so if there is a gold standard, that's it.

VisualSVN has lots of problems.  AnkhSVN 2.0+ is actually very good.
I'd recommend you check that out.  Nothing out there is exceptionally
great.

The main benefit to using integrated source control is the tool keeps
tracks of adds, drops and moved files for you, so you don't have to.
You don't want to have to find all the automatically moved or renamed
files after you've done a huge refactoring job and finally got things
compiling again.  At least, I don't want to.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Maritza Mendez<martitzam at gmail.com> wrote:
> The basic problem seems to lie in the way version control is
> integrated into VS Solution and Project files.  We find that if anyone on a
> project team is using the integration, then everyone else on the project is
> forced to either (1) also integrate the same vcs or (2) put up with litany
> of obnoxious warnings every time they pull updates from the repository.
> These warnings are generated by VS, not the vcs.

This depends on how the integration is written.  Visual Studio's new
source control SDK (since VS2005) no longer *requires* that anything
be written to solution/project files.  It still offers the ability to
the integration implementer, but it's optional.  AnkhSVN, for example,
doesn't touch those files.  In my most recent job, I was the only one
using Ankh, while everyone else stuck with Tortoise.  Worked fine.

Someone started working on a Bazaar VS integration as a Google Summer
of Code project.  It's incomplete, but it's not a bad start.  Some
details on the wiki: http://bazaar-vcs.org/VisualStudioIntegration

I've got some patches to get it compiling under Visual Studio 2008.
I'll publish my branch if anyone's interested.

Darcy.