Hey there kiddies,
If you work for any company with any decent in-house development department, you’ve probably heard the terms ‘SVN’, ‘Subversion’, or ‘CVS’ (not the pharmacy). SVN is short for Subversion which is a Concurrent Versions System, hence CVS. It’s basically a system that tracks the changes in a variety of file types, from images to html to flash. What makes this system so universally accepted is, firstly, the fact that its completely open source. Secondly it’s inherent efficiency lies in its ability to track only the changes, or deltas, in an instance of any given file, rather than just saving full file versions. It also gives you the power to roll back, merge, compare and completely control the work flow on a collaborative project down to the individual file level. It’s also very powerful in a 1 person environment, as sometimes coders have a tendency of painting themselves into corners. If used properly SVN will allow you to greatly improve your code quality and workflow, allowing you to go home and spend time with your kids, rather than staying up al night wondering where you went wrong in the past 5 hours and 250 lines of code.
Part 1 of this blog is dedicated to reaching out to all the admins, designers and developers out there to tell us what kind of files you use Subversion for, so as to illustrate the flexibility and variety that this binary versioning system has to offer.
Read on to Part 2
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we use svn at my shop all the time it is a life saver. which one do you recomend?
is this available to windows and iis for regular asp/html/image files?
To answer anonymous’s question, I use the TortoiseSVN Graphical Interface, which ties itself into windows explorer dialogs to show you a visual status of versioned files. It can be downloaded at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org. There is also a graphical interface for Mac, but it works a little differently. Basically its kind of a file-manager window that you use in tandem with your various editors, such as photoshop and dreamweaver, that shows you versioned file statuses and has all the available commands.
To answer bkj’s question: Yes, the SVN server application as well as the Tortoise interface is available for windows and does very well with asp, html, and all kinds of image files. I use the Windows version for all of the afforementioned files and it s a life saver all the time. It also helps me to establish a process for a production cycle of a file or delta. Visit http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org to download the application, its relevant documentation, and participate in forum discussions. The software is free and open-source, just the way we like it at _AskTheAdmin_.
i use svn for cataloging images. its great i couldnt live without it at work.