Installing Subversion & TortoiseSVN

James Kemp posted a guide to installing Subversion on Windows. Unlike most guides on the net, his is pretty up to date.

Note that when it comes time to install svnserve as a service, just use this command line instead of James’ longer steps:

sc create svnserve
binpath= “”C:Program FilesSubversionbinsvnserve.exe”
–service –root c:pathtoyourrepository”
displayname= “SVN Server” depend= tcpip

Note that the above command should be done all on one line — I just broke it into multiple lines for display purposes. It also assumes you installed Subversion to the default location.

TortoiseSVN is really easy to install, & adds right-click context menus to Windows Explorer so you can perform SCM commands.

Once you have Subversion & TortoiseSVN installed, you can perform checkins, checkouts, branches, merges, etc. with wild abandon.

Integrating with Visual Studio

If you want to integrate Subversion with Visual Studio, you can use the AnkhSVN Visual Studio Addin. However, be warned that AnkhSVN isn’t fully released yet (it’s on RC4). In fact, reading the blog of one of AnkhSVN’s developers, statements like “renames and deletes were very buggy“, “a number of Ankh error reports had an AccessViolationException“, and “I was pretty shocked to see that we do in fact delete files when Exclude From Project is invoked” kinda scare me. IMO you should probably treat it like a beta product for now … you don’t want to lose vital source code.

So…while I like the idea of Visual Studio integration, I just can’t have a lot of bugs, crashing, and surprise deletions on source code. I’ll just stick with TortoiseSVN for now (which is easy enough to use, just switch to Windows Explorer, make a few clicks, then switch back to Visual Studio).