First off, let's talk about clients. You've got plenty of choices, most of which are listed here, including one called Subcommander... oops. Generally, your best bet is TortoiseSVN, which integrates nicely into Explorer. If you're looking for integration in Visual Studio, there are two options. The first, AnkhSVN is an open source plug-in for Visual Studio that covers supports most of the features of SVN. Personally, I've found AnkhSVN a little flaky, and in slow in larger projects. The other option is VisualSVN, a commercial product (US $50) which acts as VS integrated front-end to TortoiseSVN. I've been running and evaluation of it for the past couple weeks, and have been pretty pleased with it so far.
Installing TortoiseSVN
- Download the latest installer from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads. As of this posting, the current release is 1.4.3.8645.
- Run the installer, choosing all default options.
- Reboot. If you're like me, you tend not reboot every time an installer tells you to, but in this case it's a good idea, due the heaving integration of TortoiseSVN into explorer.
Getting the Code
- Choose a location that you want to download the code to, and create a folder. For this example, I'm going to create a master folder called svn which sits at the root of my C:\ drive and another one inside it called subsonicproject. The full path to the project folder is C:\svn\subsonicproject
- Right-click on the project folder, and select SVN Checkout.
- In the empty text box under the word "Url of repository:" enter the following text and click "OK":
http://subsonicproject.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
- TortoiseSVN will begin downloading the latest code. Be patient: This initial download may take a few seconds to get started, and several minutes to complete.
- That's it! From this point forward, whenever you want to get the latest code, all you have to do is right click on the project folder and select SVN Update.
Have fun!
