Source Control

For some time now I have been very excited about the benefits offered by source control (SC). It provides a clear and precise record of changes made to code along with who made them and when good comments are added then it can say why.

Through our recent .Net projects we have become more familiar with one specific system for source control, Subversion (SVN) along with its popular client TortoiseSVN. I would agree that there have been ups and downs, however, looking back I think we are much better off having used then if we had not. Recently, a new client application became available, Ankh. This app is not exactly a replacement for Tortoise, instead more of a companion. The most important service that Ankh offers is that it integrates directly in to Visual Studio. Though I have not yet had time to play around with Ankh, It sounds very exciting.

Having enjoyed all the benefits of source control on our .Net projects for more than a year now, I have been very interested in using it with other languages our department develops with, most notably ColdFusion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be conducive to the way our CF apps are developed. Though each developer working on a .Net project runs a copy locally when developing, our network administrators policy is not to install CF express on each machine. This means that all CF source code resides on the server and is edited from there, with developers sharing a single copy. Though I really would like to use source control I have yet to divise a practical approach to doing so, therefore, all CF source code remains outside of source control.

Another area that would be nice to have under SC is the database. I have read many articles explaining that schema should be kept in SC, I have yet to read a comprehensive approach that would also cover data, particularly configuration data that is just as important as the schema itself. Without this data under SC then it seems like using it at all would be pointless.

One idea that I recently had was to ban all config data from being kept in the database, instead it would be kept in xml config files that could be kept under SC.

Recently, I read some interesting thoughts on the matter. Though I have not had time to read all the content, it is what lead me to the xml config file idea… If this interests you please read the 5 part series available at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001050.html