Where I’ve worked we’ve been long time Visual Source Safe users. Everytime a new version of Visual Studio would come out, we’d quickly grab it from Microsoft, cross our fingers, and pray for a new version of Visual Source Safe.

It never came. Rarely did they even slap some lipstick on it.

So, we’re moving out of the slums. This week a Ubuntu 8.04 virtual machine was created (that’s a story for another day) and we installed the latest copy of SVN.

We toyed with the idea of running SVN and Apache on a Windows Server, but if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right. Cue Mike Holmes.

Anyhow, for those few VSS users out there, so far we like AnkhSVN. I’ve got a copy of TortoiseSVN, but right not that’s just too far away from what I’m used too.

It’s nice to not have to ask someone to check in a file to make a quick chance. It’s nice to know we can FINALLY do some branching. We’re excited, but a little timid. I’ve had no luck getting our webservices into SVN, since the solution file exists seperate of the webservice itself. Right now I’m going to sit on this issue till I know a little more, but this will have to be solved.

I did run into one issue, when I moved my project from VSS to SVN and then to AnkhSVN, everytime I tried to save in Visual studio I kept getting a cannot save this file is write-protected. And it didn’t look like an IDE message, it looked like it was from Ankh. The internet was no help, nor were their forums. Finally, I wondered, maybe these files are still set read-only from their fiefdom under VSS. They were. I went through each of my local files, removed the read only flag, and I’m back in SVN bliss.

It wasn’t an easy journey with getting the SVN server up on a virtual machine, but things are looking up.

Oh, by the way! I tested both AnkhSVN and TortoiseSVN for the dreaded Empty Click Once bug, neither caused any trouble so far.