Serious programming underway. How a backups I do make?

Drez

Sorry for the ungrammar in the thread title but anyway, I'm wondering if there is some tool I can use to either automatically, or easily, make a new backup of the Visual Studio Express 2008 solution I am working on.

I'm looking to store these locally. I know I could look into something like subversion and dropbox but I'm mainly just looking to export the solution to another folder/hard drive with a version number or something, without having to manually copy the folder each time.

Is there any easy to do this? I'm still in the learning stages so I keep trying vastly different things as I go along with my project. Looking at reams of commented-out code just gives me a headache so I'd rather overwrite my old work when trying a different programming tactic, but I'd rather not lose the old work either just in case I need to revisit it later in the project.

I dunno, maybe I'm being too anal. Question remains though.

Kakodaimonos

This is something every professional developer learns to do when they start. It's called "version control" or "source control"

Here's an introduction to the basic concepts:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/

We use Subversion where I work.

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/subversion/

For Visual Studio, there's also Team Foundation Version Control, which is not free. And do not use Visual Source Safe, ever.

That's probably enough to get started with.

Drez

Sweet, thanks.

BoGs

Why not get something like beanstalk or codebasehq or github

ohhh and windows mercurial

bitbucket is popular

urahonky

Google has it's own host if you want to use SVN.

http://code.google.com/hosting/

Heir

Tortoise SVN.

Lewisham

Git + GitHub = Love

Check out http://github.com/Lewisham/ for an example.

JNighthawk

Perforce is free for OSS and has a free, 2-user, non-expiring evaluation version: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/price.html

Use actual version control. It's harder to get setup than any funky custom setup you want to do exactly what you want, but it makes it much easier later on.

LoneIgadzra

You should use Git or Mercurial. I was in the subversion camp for a while, I didn't really see what distributed revision control did for me, then I switched to distributed and holy shit it's so much better.

Mercurial is probably the better beginner choice, and maybe easier to set up on Windows (tortoise HG is kind of haphazard, but a nice tool once you get the hang of where things are). You want to know how to work it on the command line before you move up to a GUI tool though.

Drez

Thanks guys and gals. Lots of conflicting suggestions. Considering I'm the only person working on this project, would you recommend one over another? It's not going to be a shared project, I basically just want to store versions of my code as I go along.

In the meanwhile, I'll read up on all the suggestions made.

Thanks again!

Aridhol

I am thirding Git, it should fit the bill quite nicely.


also:
http://book.git-scm.com/1_welcome_to_git.html

Lewisham

I use Git and I'm the only person on my projects. Shit, I even put papers longer than 4 pages into Git repositories. It's just much safer. I also like Git's branch merging for doing new features, I've never had it barf like Subversion et al. might.

theSquid

SVN (Subversion) is a fine choice for a beginner. Simple to use, too.

And as for SVN servers... you can set up a local repository on your machine. I don't even know why that's a thing.

Shorn Scrotum Man

I like SVN. It's most useful for when you are working with others, but still great for your purpose. There are two plugins for Visual Studio that add an SVN interface, Visual SVN (which I've used and is great, but costs $50) and AnkhSVN (which I haven't used but is free!).

Cathode

Once you roll with source control, you'll never go back! Count my vote towards Perforce for general source code and asset control. For context, I'm a single developer working on an indie game (and general tech platform) which I've been tinkering around with for a couple years now, and during this time, Perforce has adequately served all of my backup and version-ing needs. As far as I recall, Perforce also adds its Visual Studio plugins automatically on installation.

LoneIgadzra

Drez wrote: »

Thanks guys and gals. Lots of conflicting suggestions. Considering I'm the only person working on this project, would you recommend one over another? It's not going to be a shared project, I basically just want to store versions of my code as I go along.

In the meanwhile, I'll read up on all the suggestions made.

Thanks again!

Git or Mercurial don't require you to set up any kind of server - all the old revision information goes inside a hidden folder in the project folder (compressed of course), so that's probably ideal, apart from the lack of Visual Studio integration.

Yeah, subversion is nice and simple, but these modern distributed systems with decent branching and merging and local repositories are so much better - and simpler to set up and start using.

Drez

Man. So many different route I could go.

VSE2008 integration is nice but I guess not totally necessary. Hmm. I have to do more research on all my options today. I think I'm leaning toward Git/Mercurial/Perforce.

Ooh, Perforce seems nice.

kevbot

If you want to try out distributed version control, I'd read this first:

http://hginit.com/top/

It's a great introduction to mercurial by Joel Spolsky, who's a great source of information about general development as well.

Jasconius

mercurial is for communists

git is just fine