Subversion Part 1: Version control just keeps getting better

Posted on June 29, 2008
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I was recently tasked with the job of speccing a new development server that will soon be ordered and built by me. But in the interim, a mirror of the development server had to be setup on my laptop and act as a proving ground for how the new development server would be setup.

The company I am inheriting the site from don’t have version control implemented – it seems as though I go from organisation to organisation where version control is either non-existent or in the very early stages of implementation. Once you get version control integrated into your workflow, I find it hard to not use it – I find it integral to development whether you are in a team of 10 or a team of 1. The safety and sanity it provides is invaluable.

Since I have had to setup SVN from scratch again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how much the platform has matured since I last implemented it. At that time it was stable but still somewhat of a newcomer up against CVS. The clients were pretty mature, but the server installations on Windows were tricky. Not anymore.

Enter VisualSVN. Couldn’t be easier to install and setup – provides a very nice set of defaults, a configuration GUI that makes setting up of users and groups and piece of cake, a built-in webserver for repository exploring and installs as a service to boot – best of all it’s free.

It’s such an easy installation process that it couldn’t be further removed from my experience trying to setup an SVN server 2 years ago. Painful doesn’t describe it. So if you’re looking for an SVN server installer, I can’t recommend VisualSVN more highly.