Friday, December 24, 2010

The AnkhSVN plug-in for Visual Studio

My department recently switched source control tools, moving from Microsoft's Visual Source Safe to Subversion.  We've been using the Windows Explorer-based Tortoise as a front-end, but we've been encountering difficulties with the lack of integration into Visual Studio.  For example, it's very easy to forgot to add new source files to the repository, often resulting in a broken build.

So I've started looking into VS plug-ins for SVN, and have been impressed with the open-source AnkhSVN.  It has a very attractive integration into the Solution Explorer, has Commit, Diff and Annotate/Blame features that display as VS window panes, and it automatically includes new solution files in the commit.  Overall, it appears to have been built with a great deal of care.  For example, the unmodified state is displayed with blue check marks, not green, because this is easier for color blind people to distinguish from red.    I've included some screen shots below the fold.