Currently our team (web devs, one designer and one copywriter) all work on separate workstations but do our changes on the same dev environment (we all mount the same shared drive), it's a marketing site and not a web application, so no builds or deployments, we just push changes to the live site once they are done, but I think it's important for us to keep versions of files, especially serverside code, even if it only makes up a tiny percentage of our content (mostly static pages).
I'd like to use version control for our work setup, but I'm not sure if SVN or GIT will play along with more than one person checking in/out from the same dev environment. I've got existing experience with SVN, CVS, GIT, Perforce and PVCS but have always worked with individual dev environments.
I'd like a solution that doesn't require us to run separate dev environments as we lack the infrastructure.
Most, if not all, version control implementations are intended to be used by more than one person. Both Subversion and GIT will happily do everything you require but you might find Subversion easier to get up and running with quickly. If you intend to host it in a Windows environment, take a look at VisualSvn Server.
The major difference between GIT and SVN is that GIT is a distributed system whereas SVN relies on a central repository. In software development, there are good arguments for using a distributed system but the needs you describe would be easily served by the much simpler SVN implementation (I think).
Another good reason for using SVN (under Windows) is that the TortoiseSvn client is one of the best examples of a user interface to any version control system. It is extremely easy to learn how to use and well documented as well as supported by the OS community.
It may also be worth investigating the various providers of hosted version control systems if you don't want the overhead of maintaining your own source control servers.
You don't need lots of server hardware. Why can't each dev/designer/etc run the site on their own computer? You do have atleast one computer each? :)
GIT or SVN in that case is just a matter of taste.
the way we used to do this at an old workplace was to give each user an account, and give the "project" and account as well. We would each check out a local working copy. the project (in your case it would be the tools that people in your business use i guess) would check out a copy too. Once the devs were all satisfied with a certain build, we would issue an update to the project working copy.
In your setup you say that you all have the same dev environment. do you mean you each have your own PC on the network, or are you sharing a PC? either way you should be able to each have your own svn accounts and local working directoires, so this would not be a problem.
Depending upon the amount of data you are talking about, an option to consider would be Dropbox ("secure backup, sync, and file sharing made easy"). It supports versioning, and lets you share folders.
It also has the benefit of providing offsite backup of, and remote web access to, your data.
With svn, you can have each submit automatically trigger an update of the live site. Still having everyone work in the same directory is somewhat awkward (as it was all the time, anyway …), but old habits die hard and assuming people insist on that, svn does export its repository via WebDAV, so it should be possible to mount it as a network filesystem on the desktop machines.
"Currently our team (web devs, one designer and one copywriter) all work on separate workstations but do our changes on the same dev environment (we all mount the same shared drive)" Adding SVN would do away with the need for the shared drive. You would each work in a local directory that is checked in to SVN. Tortoise would be a perfect client for you.
"it's a marketing site and not a web application, so no builds or deployments, we just push changes to the live site once they are done" A simple batch job (ANT script or other) could be written and given to each of you. Once the files are ready for deployment simply execute the batch and have it check out the latest files from SVN and copy to your web server.
"doesn't require us to run separate dev environments as we lack the infrastructure"
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Presumably, each of you has a separate workstation. And your workstations are separate from your web server. Just guessing, but that's typical.
You can -- trivially -- each have a private development copy on your workstations. You can then use SVN to synchronize your various changes.
You can tag a version as "good to go".
Someone can -- when you've got everything looking right -- do an update on the web server to get the official version into production.
This doesn't require any more infrastructure than you already have in place.
With SVN you can have the devs commiting to the server, and have one special user at the server checking out the latest version. So commiting you work involves commiting to SVN, then logging in to the server and do a checkout of the latest trunk.
You can use the same pattern with git and other decentralized version control systems. The advantage with these systems is that they don't enforce the central server pattern. Dev a could for instance push to b which then pushes it to the server.
Related
I've had this setup, but it didn't seem quite right.
How would you improve Content Delivery (CD) development across multiple .NET (customer) development teams?
CMS Server -> Presentation Server Environments
CMS Production -> Live and Preview websites
CMS Combined Test + Acceptance (internally called "Staging") -> Live ("Staging")
CMS Development (DEV) -> Live (Dev website) and sometimes Developer local machines (laptops)
Expectations and restrictions:
Multiple teams and multiple websites
Single DEV CMS license (typical for customers, I believe?)
Enough CD licenses for each developer
Preferably developer could program and run changes locally--was this a reasonable expectation?
Worked
We developed ASP.NET pages using the Content Delivery API against the same broker database for local machines and CD DEV. Local machines had CD dlls, their own license files, and ran/debug fine with queries and component presentation calls.
Bad
We occasionally published to both the Dev presentation server and Developer machines which doesn't seem right now, but I think it was to get schema files on our local machines. But yes, we didn't trust the Dev broker database.
Problematic:
Local machines sometimes needed Tridion-published pages but we couldn't reliably publish to local machines:
Setting multiple publication destinations for a single "Local Machine" publication target wouldn't work--we'd often take these "servers" home.
VPN blocked access to laptops offsite (used "incoming" folder at the time).
Managing publication targets for each developer and setting up CD for each new laptop was good practice (as in exercise, not necessarily as a good idea) but just a little tedious.
Would these hindsight approaches apply?
Synchronize physical files from Dev to local machines on our own?
Don't run presentation sites locally (localhost) but rather build, upload dll, and test from Dev?
We were simply missing a fourth CMS environment? As much as we liked our Sales Guy, we weren't interested in purchasing another CM license.
How could you better setup .NET CD for several developers in an organization?
Edit: #DominicCronin pointed out this is only a subset of a proper DTAP setup. I updated my terms and created a separate question to clarify DTAP with Tridion.
The answer to this one is heavily depending on the publish model you choose.
When using a dynamic model with a framework like DD4T you will suffice with just a single dev environment. There is one CMS, and one CD server in that environment and everything is published to a broker database. The CD environment could be used as an auto build system, the developers purely work locally on a localhost website (which gets the data from the dev broker database), and their changes are checked in an VCS (based on which the auto build could be done).
This solution can do with only a single CMS because there is hardly any code developed on the CMS side (templates are standardized and all work is done on the CD side).
It gets more complex if you are using a static or broker publishing model. Then I think the solution is to split Dev up in Unit-Dev and Dev indeed as indicated by Nuno and Chris.
This solution requires coding on both the CMS and CD side, so every developer has a huge benefit in having its own local CMS and CD env.
Talk to your Tridion account manager and agree a license package that suits the development model you want to have. Of course, they want to maximise their income, but the various things that get counted are all really meant to ensure that big customers pay accordingly, and smaller customers get something they can afford at a price that reflects the benefits they get. In fact, setting up a well-thought-out development street with a focus on quality is the very thing that will ensure good customer satisfaction and a long-running engagement.
OK - so the account managers still have internal rules to follow, but they also have a fair amount of autonomy in coming to a sensible deal with a customer. I'm not saying this will always work, but its way better than blindly assuming that they are going to insist on counting every server the same way.
On the technical side - sure, try to have local developer setups and a common master dev server a-la Chris's 5th. These days, your common dev environment should probably be seen as a build/integration server: the first place where the team guarantees all the tests will run.
Requirements for CM and CD development aren't very different, although you may be able to publish to multiple developer targets from one CM if there's not much CM development going on. (This is somewhat true of MVC-ish approaches, but it's no silver bullet.)
We own a small company and develop asp.net websites. Here is our work procedure:
We have a server at the company with Sql Server 2008 and IIS 7.5 installed on it. All our projects including the database and website pages are on the server. We connect to the server and edit the files using FTP, so any change to a web page can be seen at once. The programmers (less than 10 programmers) connect to the server using Visual Studio 2010.
Now we want to include source control system in our work. The problem is including a SCM in our work requires changing our way of working.
Does anyone have any advise on setting up the working environment?
Thanks in advance.
You first need to decide on what type of SCM you are going to use - centralized or distributed.
One centralized SCM is TFS - this is from MS and integrates very will with VS. I believe there is an express (basic) version that is free, but the other editions are quite expensive.
An easy and free centralized SCM to start with is subversion - you can install the SVN server on your server and setup a client for each developer.
A distributed SCM does not have a server - a popular one is GIT.
Do read up on all of these before deciding. You will also have to figure out a good workflow for your team. Start with a small project so you can gain understanding and minimize the cost of mistakes.
So many ways to do this :)
One way is to use something like http://beanstalkapp.com/ to store your source code under SVN. Each developer then has a local copy of the code to work on and a good history of changes is kept when developers commit their code (at least daily), and these changes can be emailed around to the team if you want them to be. One member of the team is then tasked with uploading the latest SVN code to the testing server once it's tested and approved locally (probably at the end of each day).
I'd recommend your developers install http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/ Toolbar into Visual Studio if you use SVN.
As an alternative to hosting your SVN repository with someone like Beanstalk, you could use the free http://www.visualsvn.com/server/ which cuts out the need to upload the latest code to your testing server, as it'd be stored right there and updated on each SVN commit. But this adds an overhead in terms of backups etc.
Let us know what road you go down in the end.
I am going to develop my first application (4 members team).I am not aware of source control tool ( Visual
source safe,Tortoise SVN).
My .NET version is 3.5. What is the best source control tool ?
Is CruiseControl a source control tool ?
Definitely avoid Visual Source Safe.
Subversion is probably a safe choice, but you will have to elaborate about your situation (E.g. how big is your team?) to get more specific advice.
Another no vote for Visual Source Safe here.
Might be an idea to get familiar with subversion as - just as others mentioned - it's widely adopted, so might be useful in the future and simply works..oh and it's free too!
TortoiseSVN integrates into the windows explorer and is both easy to use and well documented so I would give it a try.
If it's a small project of yours and you don't want to worry about hosting, I would recommend signing up for a free account at something like beanstalk, to keep it safe, without any hassle.
But if it's your first ever project, it might just give you too many additional things to learn about, so you might want to put it aside for a while.
Try GIT, it's much lighter weight than svn
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gitextensions/
you can use a local repository for just checking in your own work (to keep a history, or to keep a working version before changing everything) Or you can connect to a central repository for enterprise source control.
The company where I work used to use the SVN, Tortoise, Ankh stack but we're using Git now. Plus I use it at home on my on play projects.
(quated part is no more important since you edited your post about team size)
If you are doing some small project on
your own, maybe you shouldn't use code
versioning at all because you probably
don't need it. Code versioning helps
you with central code storage,
multi-person development code merging
(several people working on the same
file and then commit changes) and code
branching to name the most important
ones.
If I were you, and I would be the only
person developing something simple, I
wouldn't use it, because it would also
be a bit of a time-overkill.
But otherwise source control doesn't address technology like .Net framework version. Code control only stores files (with history) and is able to merge text files. Written in whatever language possible.
If you are part of a team I'd suggest using Subversion + TortoiseSVN + AnkhSVN
And No, CruiseControl is not a code versioning system. It's a continuous integration system.
If you have a pure Windows environment then VisualSVN server is a Windows version of SVN server and installs easily and cleanly. You can setup security using Windows usernames and passwords, or SVN usernames and passwords.
You can then use Tortoise to provide integration in Explorer and VisualSVN to provide Visual Studio integration (there's a small cost for VisualSVN) or you could try AnkhSVN if all you want is VS integration and don't want to spend any money. Personally I prefer VisualSVN's integration.
Running a GIT server under Windows is, umm, frankly a pain in the ass, and not a route I'd recommend for beginners. VS integration is also fraught with pain.
As with everyone else I'd say avoid SourceSafe like the plague.
CruiseControl is not a source control system, it's an automated build server. It monitors source control servers looking for changes, then checks everything out, compiles it and runs it through your unit tests, so people know if they've broken the build. Once you have source control up and running it's the next big step towards a better build environment.
Before we start talking about source control, I would like you to consider your actual need for it, if this is to be your first .NET application. Is this your actual first attempt of writing some .NET 3.5 code? If so, I doubt that you need to worry about source control just yet. I would say it's not just a little bit overkill for the first learning projects.
On the other hand, if this is to be your first application that you'll actually sell to someone, it's a completely different matter.
I currently use VisualSVN, an add-in to Visual Studio that lets you do check-in, check-out etc from within the environment. Along with it, I use the free SVN repository service at XP-Dev. It works well for me =)
Your choice of a versioning system does not have to do anything with the .NET version you are using.
I'd vote for Subversion / Tortoise SVN. It's rock-solid, has lots of handy features, widely adopted and free.
I'm a newbie developers and building an application with 3 other remote developers. I've only worked alone until now, and now I need a way to share my source code with the other developers on the project. All of the project sites out there (SourceForge, Codeplex, Google, etc) seem to be aimed at Open Source development I'm not interested in making our code available to the world, I'm just looking for a method of sharing the code among the four of us. What is the best known method...or how is this usually accomplished?
Set up a Subversion repository (can be accessed across http).
There is an excellent online free book detailing pretty much everything you need to know about Version Control with Subversion
Yep, you need a version control repository which is remotely accessible. Subversion is excellent and very widely used; Git is another good option.
You could set up your own repository - you'll need a server which all devs can access via ssh, or via Apache/WebDAV - or use a hosted service, like Beanstalk, Project Locker, Unfuddle, SVNsite, etc.
http://beanstalkapp.com/
Set up a Subvserion repository (http://subversion.tigris.org/). You can control who may view your data through accounts, plus it gives you document versioning. When paired with a Http server, you can even view the source directly in a browser.
Subversion has all sorts of plugins for Eclipse and even Visual Studio, I believe. Tortise SVN is a stand-alone SVN client you may like, although I recommend an IDE-integrated plugin.
Subversion also goes well with a continuous integration server, such as Continuum.
Hosted: http://wush.net is another Subversion hosting platform.
Or, if you can host your own server, check out the VERY easy to use and VERY free VisualSVN Server: http://www.visualsvn.com/server/
You don't say what computing resources you have available, but the easy choice is to use a central server with say SVN to which you all have ssh access using a public key. You can probably rent such a service for around $10 per month.
If you don't like central servers, you can try Mercurial or git and ssh back and forth between your personal development machines.
If ssh is problematic, git actually enables you to send patches to each other by email (probably Mercurial does too). Ben Lynn's Git Magic tutorial explains.
You can use an online source control (like SVN or Git), and share it only with your team members. You should look into Unfuddle, it's a free source control/project hosting, complete with bug tracking system. I use it for my personal projects and it's awesome.
I think the best solution is Subversion. Subversion is a free source control system that is ideal for your requirement.
You can use many other support tools like Tortoise SVN to make the things more easier.
Here is one of the cheat sheets that describes commands of SVN.
Most of the Web hosting providers support easy one click installation of SVN on their servers. ex : Dreamhost So you can get a setup done very easily.
CVS is another Source control system that are used widely but I haven't seen any providers that support easy installation of CVS but there should be. You can have support tools for CVS such as Tortoise CVS as well.
I don't think you are interested in visual source safe (Microsoft Proprietary and not over Web) so I am not going to add information about it here. :)
You need to set up a source control repository. It's a pretty big topic, I'm really not sure where the best place to start reading about it would be. I'm sure the Wikipedia article on Revision Control will at least give you a bit of an overview.
This seems like a decent introductory series as well: Source Control HOWTO
Subversion works just fine over http/https. It is an open source project, but you can use it for whatever purposes you want.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
Most modern source control systems work well. Subversion is a common one. Which operating system will the developers be running?
If you just want to get up and running quickly with something, check out a hosted subversion system like www.beanstalk.com or www.unfuddle.com.
Subversion is open source, and I know you don't need it, but there are a lot of options here. If on Windows, check out Tortoise SVN. If on a Mac and you don't want a command line client, check out Versions.
You can actually setup google code to only allow viewing/editing by registered members. And I don't think they force any licenses either.
We currently use VSS but are in the process of migrating everything over to Source Gear Vault because VSS makes jumping out of our third story windows a common thought...
Here is a free solution with premium options available... https://freepository.com I have not tried this one.
Try github. It will cost you $12/month though.
Just use devunity.com. upload your code via zip or import it from svn and thats it. lets you collaborate around code instantly.
I would like to start learning ASP.NET on a for-fun project. I'm hoping to setup a local server to do my development on, but I don't want to pollute my user account with a webserver, database, and developer tools.
I'm using Vista Home Premium as my desktop OS. Is it possible to setup a separate user in vista and contain all the developer stuff inside it? (Keep sql server, IIS, and Visual Studio separate so they don't run when I'm not doing development work)
If this isn't possible can someone suggest a good alternative?
Use a virtual machine such as VMWare.
I personally don't see any benefits of creating a separate user for this. There's a webdevserver bundled with VS for development use. This only runs when you start it. And VS itself doesn't do anything unless you are using it...
SQL Server can be set to be started manually.
If you're just getting started, check out the express editions of visual web developer and sql server.
I agree with ocdecio: a virtual machine is the way to go. The nice thing, as well, is that you can take a few hours to configure your development environment and then save it intact. That way, if you ever hose it, you do not have to spend another day configuring it. Think of it as "Environment Management" to go along with your Source Code Management. The only caveat is to make sure you have plenty of RAM (2+ GB). RAM is much cheaper than time these days!
I have to agree with the above.
I have all the dev stuff on my one user account (I'm using Vista Home Premium too), but nothing runs unless I ask it too.
When installing Sql Server, you should be prompted if you want the service to start automatically or manually. Choose manual and run off one user account.
#mdbritt
This case is a development learning env for asp.net. I can hardly believe that a virtual environment is preferred for this. Nor for any other normal development environment.
Why not just create an image of the hard drive if you want to avoid time spent on reinstall and reconfigure?
I agree with ocdecio: a virtual machine is the way to go. For some things, you can even download fully functional VM's direct from MS (ie Sharepoint Development). The VM's can be a real timesaver and they're easy to backup in entirety.