From time to time, even in this enlightened age of software development, I run into developers that don’t use version control for their software projects. I don’t understand why. The state of software development isn’t like it was a decade ago where CVS was the only free option and all of the commercial systems cost a lot of money. I even remember when people had to pay for Visual SourceSafe just to endure the pain. But in the modern era, there are a lot of choices that are very economical, and the commercial systems aren’t that bad either. More...

Since learning about Source Server and how it works with debuggers such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio or WinDBG from the Debugging Tools for Windows, I’ve become an avid fan of adding version control information to my debug and release-mode PDB symbol files. I’ve learned the value of having this information in my symbol files for debugging programs that I’ve released to users that they have had problems with. Also, having them for debugging minidumps has become an invaluable tool that I simply cannot live without. More...

About a week ago, I started taking a look at a new version control system (at least it’s new to me). The version control system is called Git, and it’s one of a new generation of distributed version control systems that are being targeted towards geographically distributed teams. Git is gaining significant ground in the open source world as it was originated by the Linux kernel team to coordinate their development of the Linux kernel. But I’m seeing it pop up on more things such as FitNesse. More...