After installing Visual Studio, I install “version control” software – also called “source control”.
If you aren’t familiar with version control, it’s something that lets you save a version of the program you’re working on. You save these changes in a “repository”.
After you save a version of your program, you can make more changes. If the changes are good, you save the new version. If the changes are bad, you can compare your current version with the last version – to find out where the problem might be. Or, you can “revert”, or “roll back” your changes to the last version.
Version control is also very useful if you are working on a project with other programmers.
If you become a professional programmer, you’ll almost always use a version control system. If you ever work for a company that doesn’t use version control, I’d be worried – that’s not a good sign.
Video for installing TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN
In this video, I show you how to install Subversion – a popular source control system. I’ll install TortoiseSVN, which includes the Subversion server (which lets you have repositories) and a client (which let you save your project to the repository).
Then, I show you how to install VisualSVN. This lets you work with Subversion, while you are inside Visual Studio, working on your project.
Future videos on source control
This video only shows the installation of TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. There is almost nothing in the video on how you can use Subversion while programming.
The next video I plan to make is how to install GitHub – an online source control system, for open-source projects (unless you want to pay, and have private repositories).
I also plan to make a future video, or videos, on how to use more features of source control. These will cover using automated/unit tests, and using continuous integration to run your tests every time you save changes to your source control repository – letting you know if your changes broke anything.
Links from this video
http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html
https://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/download/
https://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/downloads
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