Component Software Revision Control System

[Guest moo_ski_doo]

I don't know if this is of any interest to anyone at all, but I got very excited about this piece of software (sad I know) so here you go anyway...

I've been using a VCS at work for a while, and after realising the advantages of them I decided to look in to getting one for personal use. In case you don't know, a VCS (Version Control System - also sometimes called RCS, Revision Control System) is basically a system which keeps a history of your files so you can go back to a previous version at any time. It also helps when you're working as part of a team because it means that people accross a network can share each other's files easily, but obviously as a single user this is not the part I'm interested in. Anyway, when I looked in to getting one I was surprised to see how expensive they were. The one we use at work, Visual SourceSafe, is about £400 which is well out of my price range, so I thought I'd have a look at some others, which is when I stumbled on this little gem. I've had CS-RCS for a while, but finally got around to setting it up properly yesterday, and I already love it! It does most of the more important stuff that SourceSafe does (with the noticable lack of some of the more advanced features like branching and merging, but you can generally live without these,) and in some cases it handles it even better than SourceSafe; it integrates nicely with Visual Studio, including eVC, and the best part is that it's free for single users! The only downsides to this piece of software are that cosmetically it leaves a little to be desired (although it's really not too bad) and it's a little quirky - for example, files seem to be checked out permanently, which is a little annoying but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Anyway, after having used this for just a day, I'm loving it - at some point I'll hopefully set it up on my server and get it running as a backup for all my files - for now it's just serving me well as a VCS for my coding projects.

So my advice, particularly to any developers, is to get hold of this and try it out. Having a VCS in place is extremely useful, and you'll find it frequently saves your skin, and for the money (£0.00,) this is a damn good one.

Search downloads.com for VCS or RCS and you should be able to find it easily; it's called CS-RCS Basic - or you could go for CS-RCS Pro if you've got $145 to spare!

Hope this is of some use to someone - if you've tried it out let me know what you think :lol: