Source Code Control

One of the bigger issues that a lot of people miss when running with a personal project is source code maintenance.

Its easy to say that keeping a copy of the code on your machine is enough , but this is not its all to easy these days to loose  a system to a crash or virus. Keeping a local source server doesn’t really help too much if you are a roaming developer as setting up external access is not the easiest .

So now the choice comes . make the project open source and host the project on one of the many open source hosting sites .Or rent a private hosting server if the project is closed source.

For a starting developer the open source hosts are usually the best as they provide free hosting and some interesting features that will help with project calibration. There are many open source hosts , but at the moment the 2 that i find to be the preferred options are Google Source Code and Codeplex.

Codeplex is very well designed and your project will recieve a lot .net responses as codeplex is a .net community. The only downside i found to codeplex is that the SCC is very annoying depending on how you look at it . They have 3 different SCC options ,a custom codeplex app that you need to use to access the code,a teamprise option is also available but this is not free and requires registration with the company to use .The final option is the team server option , which to me is the best , but it requries that you have a full version of visual studio with the team sever plugin installed. Now this is fine for a non startup company as VS can be quite expensive .

Google Code is pretty much the same in terms of hosting i.e. they host the code for you . Their SCC is done using subversion which is to me the preferred option as it the easiest to setup on a dev machine and not to mention the smallest in terms of size footprint. Plus Gogle allows for other hings suchs as wikis to be developed on line and off line as well with a interface provided by them.

While there are many options available i have just covered some of the more common and bigger options .Let me know if you know of any better places or ideas