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AlexCode wrote: "Disconnected" and "VPN" in the same sentence? 
Lately at my job this has been laughable... grrr!
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Could anyone in this situation elaborate about... why?
No criticism... pure curiosity 
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Real developers don't use source control and they write in machine code on punch cards.
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sounds more like jon skeet style
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NotePad and 1s and 0s, we don't need no stinking compiler.
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I don't, but seeing how many people do has made me think that I probably should.
I'm the only one who does .Net development at my company and so I manage all of my source code on my laptop with daily backups.
In this case, how would you actually implement source control? I want to be able to get to all of my projects without an internet connection when I am out of the office so I would have to install the SVN server on my laptop. Does that not kind of defeat the purpose of it?
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"I'm the only one who does .Net development at my company and so I manage all of my source code on my laptop with daily backups."
Source Control is not (only) about backing up your work.
It's about having an interactive way to see what/who changed what and when.
It's the ability to create separate branches of work without messing each other
It's about having separate branches per environment, or at least a separate branch for production and being able to pick what goes into that branch.
Man... I could go on and on with this...
For the scenario you describe, use Git...
With Git every machine have a full repository.
You can commit (locally), create branches, see history, etc.
Everything works locally and once you have a connection with the remote repository you can push your changes. This is actually the thing that makes Git different from the others.
Merges work pretty well so if you have conflicts with other people changes you can easily fix them.
So hop on to http://git-scm.com/[^]!!
https://github.com/[^] is also a good place to start if you want to create and play with some public repositories. If you want to pay them they can also host your private repos.
Cheers!!!
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So you're saying that creating a copy of a project and appending _old, _old2, _old3 etc to the folder name isn't the correct way to handle different versions?
Thanks, I'll take a look at Git, I had messed around with SVN a while back but had thought the need for a server to to be running a bit of an overkill.
My backups are incremental so I can restore certain files from certain dates but it's obviously not ideal.
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_old1, _old2, etc. is not very useful - or do you keep track of what _oldN really means?
Setting up a local SVN repository is zero effort (a one-liner, beside installing the software). On the local machine, you do not need a server running.
Cheers
Andi
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Thanks, I'll take a look at SVN too.
I'll just need to figure out how to backup these repositories, I'm guessing that there would be a database as well as a filestore to backup?
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Backup the repository directory as a whole (all is contained in that directory). No need to care what exact (directory) structure and format it is.
Cheers
Andi
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Both Git and SVN save their "stuff" in a directory in the filesystem.
the only thing you need is to backup that folder.
It's as easy as it can get
Although if you really want off-line power you should go for Git.
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Once upon a time, when I backed up into zip files, each was given the yyyymmdd as part of the file name.
No ambiguity in that part.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Honestly I don't feel safe working without an SCM...
Even for more simple things like for instance you want to test something that will probable screw up a lot of code. With and SCM you can just do whatever and at the end if it didn't turn out to be as expected just rollback everything (or just a subset of it).
Man, it's a time/life saver
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If you want to keep your brain in your head, you should also have a look at Mercurial (abbreviated as hg). Ir's a distributed VCS like Git, but is way friendlier to the user, having sane command line parameters, easy to understand documentation and the most awesome GUI, which is the only usable GUI, which is the same on any current desktop OS (TortoiseHg).
Furthermore, it doesn't need an isolated Unix environment on Windows, which makes working with Mercurial a lot more portable than using Git in your projects.
Everybody may have his or her reasons for using this or that VCS, but I strongly advise you to at least have a look at Mercurial, because you are probably going to regret it, if you started all your projects with something else and had to learn about Mercurial afterwards.
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You will be able to have local copies of your sourcecode.
I am in the same situation, and to be honest: Visual Source Safe saved my ... more than once because I was able to track source changes to see when a modification was made or to simply "throw everything away" with a simple "undo check-out".
Thomas
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Use Git for that - it is made to (also) work offline.
Source control is not for teams only and its main feature is not "backup" in the traditional sense.
Beside several other features, a version control system allows:
- encapsulating logically meningful and commented change sets (e.g. of several files) that allows to specifically roll back if needed
- adding associations with issue tracking systems (the lowest level of intergation is to mention the fixed issues in the change set comment)
- producing a worklog and/or create some kind of release notes
- creating concurrently existing variants of the sources (AKA branching)
- ...
Ask yourself if you can achieve this with your backup "solution" - without re-inventing the wheel, i.e. without trying to mimic the version control systems featurs.
Cheers
Andi
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Use something that doesn't have a central repository (i.e. Git, Mercurial). Don't forget constant backups take up way more space then if you were using source control (since source control only stores differences instead of entire backups). Plus, you have a bunch of added value, a complete history of development, ability to branch code off, ability to create tags for a complete history (i.e. you'll always have the source for every release you make, so you can even support multiple releases), easily see differences in files between any random points in time. There's a lot of value added, plus, most solutions are free... so you really don't have an excuse not to use them...
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AlexCode wrote: No criticism
Bullshit.
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Really, I meant it.
I'm not here and I'm no one to criticize anyone.
I like to help and I rarely judge people... Rarely...
As an IT professional I moved a lot (countries and projects) and I've been exposed to a lot of different ways of thinking. Some really good, others really bad but that's life and most of those really bad decisions had a really good explanation when they were taken.
At the end, a Bad Decision is always better than a No Decision.
Back to the subject, as the usage of an SCM is kind of an instinct to me, I'm curious why it isn't for so many people.
That's all... no criticism!
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I would guess that there are a few people who are new to programming and don't realize they need it yet.
To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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I think the problem is way beyond noobs...
From what I see the most affected are professionals that actually work alone or really small teams with no experienced guidance.
SCM implementation is really a no brainer but if you never get exposed to it and don't have to curiosity chances are that you'll never reserve the time to implement it... at least not until something really bad happens...
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