Related
Nutshell :
I'd like some help / info / resources r.e. setting up a Team Build, MsBuild, TFS 2010 automated deployment for my Web App to Azure (inc. all the DB bits).
Ideally I'd like to have a process that I can fire off from the VS2010 Team Explorer UI "Queue New Build", then just keep an eye on its progress, releasing me to work on something else. Options to delve into logging for any issues, and know that my process is robust, complete and totally non-manual, i.e. :
Backs up all my Live data (SQL Azure
and Azure Blobs)
Deploys any DB schema changes (contained in my DB project)
Deploys any data changes to my core data (e.g. config data etc - which I have in my Post-Deployment scripts)
Does things sensibly (e.g. using compression for deployment packages to save time & bandwidth)
Cover my silly backside (e.g. seamlessly rolling back failed changes)
Keeps app 100% running during deployments (failed or successful) e.g. sessions left intact, minimal chances of data loss
Keep detailed logs of processes progress at each stage for fixing any issues
Keep everything that should be Source Controlled well... source controlled
Background / Dream / Goal :
At my last FT job we had a pretty sweet automated deployment setup for our hosted Web Apps, using CC.Net (to manage the process), CCTray & the CC.NET web UI to monitor and control, Code Generation (CodeSmith + NetTiers templates for data access & entities), MSBuild, VS Databse Projects, a few .bat scripts, and some handy utilities like PsExec etc to help out with little bits and pieces.
I didn't set it up, but have some experience managing it, dealing with issues etc.
It was (98% of the time) a lovely experience to deploy. You'd make sure TFS was up to date, double click CCtray, right click on a project and then click "Force Build", sit back and watch Green => Yellow => Green.
Great !!
Current Situation :
I run my own Micro ISV, and my main project is an App on Azure (in Beta).
I'd very much like to replicate the kind of deployment experience I had before - I'm even considering moving out of Azure to dedicated servers - just because I know I can setup an automated deployment system there.
My main stopping point is the DB bits, seems like a nightmare. Maybe I'm missing some great free tool or library which would do the job, I really hope so, but I also could really do with someone experienced with this to point me in the right direction for a "Best Practice" solution to wrap up all the little bits neatly.
I have scoured Google, read and read, burnt hours and hours, but what I seem to find atm is half solutions, not quite right for my project and needs, based on expensive tools I can't afford (near $0 budget), or is plain over my head and a bit incomprehensible & scary.
Now I'm NO Sys Admin, but with enough time I can generally work out what I need to do for these sort of things.
However, I don't have ANY time right now, and the success of my whole project really depends on me being able to cut out the horrendous 40min+ manual deployment wastage I currently endure.
I want to be able to get some user feedback, find a bug, or code an improvement and confidently just fire off a deploy and crack on with something else.
The extra issues with development for Azure in its current state (as opposed to dedicated servers), and the currently fairly poor tooling support from MS (I know there's lots of improvements coming, but I need something right now) - has left me swimming in a sea of "I don't know"'s & "I'm not sure"'s and tends to end in one big :
"I give up + a manual deploy for almost an hour + a little sobbing inside as my dream of deployment heaven dies once again" :(
But I know people out there more proficient, knowledgeable and experienced than myself have cracked this one for themselves. I just can’t seem to find the info I am sure is out there.
So if anyone has some good resources, tips, links, comments, or opinions on this, I'd love to hear.
Details Of My Setup :
App up and running in Azure (which is in Beta - partly due to not having the auto deploy setup), running in a Production slot, I haven't bothered with a staging slot, as some issues with subdomains / DNS / the auto generated Url has made that look painful / not feasible.
Azure / App :
App is
1 Web Role
ASP.NET 4
MVC 2
EF 4
SQL Azure
Azure Blob Storage
1 Worker Role - this runs some scheduled tasks, and works with same DB and Blob Storage
SQL Azure
Azure Blob Storage
The 2 Roles communicate with the Azure queue system (or will do shortly)
Locally :
Datacenter 08 (DC) + Hyper V
- VM for TFS 2010
- VM for a Linux firewall
Dev Box 1 (Win 7)
- VS 2010 / VS 08
- SQL 08 R2 / 05
Dev Laptop 2
- as above.
I tend to run these together all the time (so I never need to stop to wait for anything) with the FANTASTIC free tool Synergy to bind Keyboard, Mouse, Clipboard together.
Some Of The Stuff I've Read :
I have read what I have found and some of its great stuff, so I am also posting these links here to help other's struggling with this stuff, but none of it quite seems to do the trick, or maybe I don't get the trick maybe I'm missing something ?
http://deploytoazure.codeplex.com/
How do I manage and publish a database with my MVC2 application on Azure?
How can I automate the "generate scripts" task in SQL Server Management Studio 2008?
http://www.koltovich.com/blog/DeployingAzureProjectFromTFS2010BuildServer.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff803365.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432988.aspx
http://www.jimzimmerman.com/blog/2010/03/16/Deploying+An+Azure+Project+Using+TFS+2010.aspx
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/azurecmdlets
http://selfpacedazure.web.officelive.com/Documents/Windows%20Azure%20Platform%20Articles%20from%20the%20Trenches.pdf
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg651132.aspx
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/overview-of-tools-to-use-with-sql-azure.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178078.aspx
http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2011/05/13/Continuous-Integration-in-the-Cloud.aspx
http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2009/12/31/Synchronizing-a-Local-Database-with-the-Cloud-using-SQL-Azure-Sync-Framework.aspx
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/overview-of-tools-to-use-with-sql-azure.aspx
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/developing-and-deploying-with-sql-azure.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tomholl/archive/2011/02/23/using-msbuild-to-deploy-to-multiple-windows-azure-environments.aspx
http://www.scarydba.com/2011/04/25/sql-azure-deployments/
Disclaimer / Forum Abuse Minimisation Blurb :
Like I say I am NO Sys Admin, I am NO script magician, and NO CI guru, I am a simple minded web dev, so pls pls be nice if its mindlessly easy to you, or if I stoopidly am missing the point, I don't mean to be all "Does You Haz the codes?" But I’ve basically spent 6 months dreaming that one day soon someone will post a nice clear simple blog entry with an "Idiots guide" that solves all my woes, and an hour later I am in deployment heaven again, but I am still waiting (or Googling badly), and its breaking my little Developer's heart :(
P.S. I promise that If I get a good answer here I'll do my bit for the fantastic SO community and spend at least 8 hours scouring for questions I might be able to help with and contributing back.
Great.
It seems the new SQL Server (Code Named Denali), along with the new SQL Server Developer Tools (Code Named Juneau), and specifically the 2.0 release of DAC projects may well have filled the gap between development and deployment to SQL Azure.
The new v2.0 of the DAC framework expands the set of supported objects
to full support of SQL Azure schema objects and data types across all
DAC services: extract, deploy, and upgrade
From SQL Azure Import/Export
Also see :
Bob Beauchemins Blog Post suggesting schema upgrades on SQL Azure are now
supported with the new DACImportExportCli.exe utility.
Other suggestions the new DACs 2.0 solve the major issues with upgrade deployments to SQL Azure
And looks like it all should run side by side with current setup. Will check it out and update here on progress. Brilliant.
For the database deployments I use RedGate compare which works well with Azure. There is a command line edition which can be used as part of an automated build process. Regarding keeping the site always running, you should deploy to staging and then the production site is never down. Once deployed you can switch the staging over to prod.
I haven't thought this through to completion, but it seems that if nuget is a tool for managing the inclusion of packages in a known location, could it not be used as a deployment tool for web servers (a website being just a very large package itself)?
A service running on the web server would ping a nuget server for updates, and install them when available. There would have to be some additional management (recycling app pools, making sure that all your webservers don't update at the same time etc.), but I think it could work?
Any thoughts?
Yes that's definitly on the roadmap for openrasta/openwrap, so it's not a crazy idea. Some people already have done some of that work themselves.
This sort of thing is usually known as a Continuous Integration (CI for short) setup. You could probably cobble something together with Nuget but there are already some pretty good tools out there. Cruise and TFS to name a couple.
If you're looking for a mad scientist project though, carry on and let the community know what you come up with!
I have a very large, mostly HTML/SSI site that I manage part-time and do weekly deployments on in addition do being an enterprise Magento developer. The site in question has ~5000 static HTML files and requires a lot of upkeep to manage deployments.
In addition to that site, I manage numerous Magento installs. I currently manage them from SVN and do exports/checkouts from various production and qa branches/tags.
While this is manageable, I don't get some of the things that I know build tools provide. Some of those features would be:
Automatic Minification of CSS/JS
Revision History
Multi-server deployment
Runtime configuration
Stats of broken builds/build time/deployment frequency
Integration with Testing frameworks
The three tools I've been reviewing are
Apache Ant
phpUnderControl
Capistrano (at the insistence of a friend of mine who is a RoR dev)
I briefly looked at Hudson, and had a ton of problems trying to get it up and running.
My Questions:
What is the upside/downside of going to this type of strategy?
Any hidden pitfalls that you've experienced?
Which tool do you think would best fit for the deployment/management of the HTML site?
Does anyone have experience with deploying distributed Magento from a deployment/build management system?
Thanks in advance...
Update
Still no movement here, so I'm going to ask this:
Should I rather rebuild in HTML5 Boilerplate which has Ant build scripts out of the box? This would afford me the ability to use Ant, but the build scripts are already pre-made so I have a good starting point. Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
I've got one more tool for you to review: Jenkins (earlyer: Hudson).
Its a great tool to run and control your builds. Furthermore you can remote the console and get notifications via Jabber protocol.
I'm just learning how to do things, and want to start using some sort of version control for a web app.
What's most appropriate for deploying a python or php web app on my own? I'm using linux and have a linux server.
Thanks!
SVN, but you need to be able to easily deploy your webapp with SVN.
Since it is not always a simple task, so I just point out this article which may be of interest for your project.
General principle:
Configure Apache on your development server so that it picks up your checked out working copies as separate subdomains. Using this, you can simply make a checkout of your project and it will automagically be up and running. No need to touch the Apache configuration. You need a DNS wildcard entry so that all subdomains of dev.example.org go to your development server.
The only problem with using the above Apache configuration locally is the DNS wildcard. Unless your desktop is assigned a hostname by your network's DNS server and you can set the wildcard there, you will have to make do with your localhost address. You can install dnsmasq to act as a local caching DNS server and put the wildcard on your own machine
Use dnsmasq so you can achieve the same effect on your own development machine. That way you can develop your web applications locally and you won't need a central development server. In my examples I will be assuming you use subversion for your version control, but it works virtually the same with other version control packages, such as git or bazaar.
Note: (Humor)
This other question on Subversion allowed me to point out to this article about publishing its (source-controlled) data into production, with in it probably the ugliest diagram I ever saw on the topic ;-)
If I had not bumped into git, I would've doubtless gone with SVN. Having said that, I would recommend git.
Nowadays, I would certainly go with a distributed version control system. Setup is faster since you don't need to set up a version control server and everything, all you usually need to do is initialize a certain directory within your development box for version control and you're good to go. They also seem like the way to go these days. If it were 2001, I would recommend a centralized system like Subversion. But it's 2008, everyone is moving to distributed systems and user interfaces and supporting tools tend to get better.
Here are some suggestions for you:
Darcs: Easy to learn and has all the features you will usually need
Mercurial
Git: Powerful. May take some time to understand but evolves rapidly
All three of them should be readily available in your Linux-based OS through the usual package management solutions.
SVN is great.
Nowadays the hype around DVCS.
I prefer Bazaar.
Because of it's name, the support, the feature set, and it works well on my window$ machine too.
I'm using unfuddle.com and I love it. It's free for a one person web app
The answer really depends on your way of thinking. I personally had problems switching to subversion from SourceSafe. If you come from microsoft shop, I'd suggest using SourceGear Vault, it is free for <=2 users. If you come from non microsoft area, then using subversion would be preferrable. Also please consider git if working on linux.
HTH, Valve.
Personally I use monotone, learning a DVCS is definitely the way forward.
For a one-man job, pretty much any revision control system will do the job. It's when you get into multiple people, and past that into multiple repositories, where there start to be differences.
Given that, I'd go with whatever Free Software system your development environment supports best. I see Subversion and Git mentioned and both are fine choices.
SVN would been my first choice. If I have to take a second choice I would go to CVS.
One of the most popular models out there today is Subversion. It's generally easy to setup & configure and is able to handle multiple platforms.
SVN. If one does not need concurrent access (which is your case), it is VERY easy to setup as no server is required at all. Definitely your weapon of choice.
I wholeheartedly agree with SVN. Command-line SVN is quite easy too.
While I like svn a lot, I've found mercurial handy for having the whole repository locally. (the same goes for git, but its interface is a little less polished in my opinion.)
I'm not able to answer the question as asked, because I don't develop on a Linux server.
But maybe this experience has a counterpart in Linux world.
I use a local-on-my-LAN-only IIS server (actually on an old laptop that no longer travels but works as a little server). I have VSS installed on that server too. There is an integration between the IIS Server, the FrontPage extensions on that server, and the VSS.
The upshot is that I can use FrontPage to build and edit my site and build a development image that is always backed up in VSS, and I can check out, check in, and do all of that from within FrontPage.
Now, the way I publish is I take advantage of the sharing capability of VSS so I have a deployment image that shares with the project that is actually an IIS web site. I have a deployment-image directory that I can transfer the latest checked-in material to (material that has not changed is not updated). I then deploy the deployment image to the hosted, public web site using FTP (again, only transfering new and updated files).
I present all of these details to suggest what might be the use-case of interest, even though a different solution approach is needed with Linux.
If I wasn't using a tool that integrated with the web server and also the source control at the server, I could do something similar by checking the VSS material in and out of a local directory and then pushing the updated VSS project to the IIS server web-pages directory hierarchy. The workflow is a little more clumsy. In this case, I would not edit pages directly on the development web server unless I could lock check-in pages as read-only or something.
Does this suggest anything that might be appealing in the Linux server case?
Definitively Mercurial is a good choice, quick, easy to use, perfect for working alone, or with multiple other developer, perfectly multiplateform, handles merges, branches, etc. very simply, plugin based, there are great tools out there such as nice IDE plugins (notably Netbeans and Eclipse).
Robust, it works just as you a expect such a tool to work, not like SVN (and I have years of day to day)...
Both Sun, Xen and Mozilla host all their repos on Mercurial. We're currently moving from SVN to Mercurial after a 6 month daily test, without any regret.
I once used Perforce and was impressed with it. There's GUI and command line versions and it supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix for both the server and client. It integrates with Eclipse and has APIs for writing your own client applications (C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Python) It only supports two users and five workspaces before you need to buy licenses though (but that is within the scope of this question).
Subversion is a good choice. For the client, there's TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) that integrates with the shell and lets you do things with a right click on a folder. For integration with Visual Studio (I'll assume that's your environment) there's VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/) and AnhkSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/). For the server there's a one-click installer you can find here (http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/) that does the setup in a snap. VisualSVN also has a (free) server that you can use which provides it's own web access and security (rather than using apache) and has a mmc-snapin for managing/creating repositories and users.
CVS - No, I'm not joking. Not that it is better (it is not) or the simplest (it isn't), but it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. The important thing is to get started with ANY version control system even if it is a one-developer shop, even if it is CVS.
What's the recommended source control system for a very small team (one developer)?
Price does not matter. Customer would pay :-)
I'm working on Vista32 with VS 2008 in C++ and later in C# and with WPF. Setting up an extra (physical) server for this seems overkill to me. Any opinions?
I would use Subversion (in fact I use it) [update: Jul 2014 -- I use Git -- see end of the answer].
SVN is:
free,
good enough (see disadvantages below),
simple,
works fine on Windows (and Linux too),
a lot of people use it so it's easy to get help,
can integrate with most of IDEs i.e. Visual Studio (i.e. ankhsvn or VisualSVN -- more info) or Eclipse (i.e. Subclipse -- here someone asked about that).
I would strongly recommended separate machine to source control server. At best somewhere on the cloud. Advantages:
You don't lost your source control repositories if your development box dies.
You don't have to worry about maintenance of one more box.
There are companies which host SVN repositories.
Here are links to SVN (client and server) packages for various operating systems.
Disadvantages of SVN
I am using SVN on Windows machine for about 5 years and found that SVN has a few disadvantages :).
It is slow on large repositories
SVN (or its client -- TortoiseSVN) has one big disadvantage -- it terrible slow (while updating or committing) on large (thousands of files) repositories unless you have SSD drive.
Merging can be difficult
Many people complain about how hard merging is with SVN.
I do merging for about 4 years (including about 2 years in CVS -- that was terrible, but doable) and about 2 years with SVN.
And personally I don't find it hard -- on the other hand -- any merge is easy after merging branches in CVS :).
I do merge of large repository (two repositories in fact) once a week and rarely I have conflicts which are hard to solve (most of conflicts are solved automatically with diff software which I use).
However in case of project of a few developers merging should not be problem at all if you keep a few simple rules:
merge changes often,
avoid active development in various branches simultaneously.
Added in July 2011
Many devs recommended Distributed Version Control like Git or Mercurial.
From single developer perspective there are only a few important advantages of DVCS over SVN:
DVCS can be faster.
You can commit to local repository without access to central one.
DVCS is hot thing and fancy to use/learn (if someone pay for your learning).
And I don't think merging is a problem in case of single developer.
Joel Spolsky wrote tutorial about Mercurial which is definitively worth to read.
So, despite of many advantages of DVCS I would stay with SVN if merging or speed is not a problem.
Or try Mercurial, which according to this and this SO questions, is better supported (in July 2011) on Windows.
Added in July 2014
For about a year I use Git (Git Bash mainly) for my pet-projects (i.e. solving Euler problems) and local branches for each Euler problem are really nice feature -- exactly as it is described as advantage of DVCS.
Today Git tooling on Windows is much, much better then 2 or more years ago.
You can use remote repo (like GitHub or ProjectLocker and many others) to keep
copy of your project away from your workstation with no extra effort/money.
However I use GUI client only to looks at diffs (and sometimes to choose files to commit),
so it's better to not afraid of command line -- it's really nice.
So as of today I would go with Git.
I would also recommend Mercurial. It's command set is much like the one found in Subversion, so the learning curve is not that steep. As mentioned earlier, it's designed to run locally, but it's also easy to share/merge changes across computers, or even just push it to a remote server for backups.
It offers excellent tools, like TortoiseHG, and it has good plugins for NetBeans and Eclipse. It also runs natively on Win32, as it's written in Python.
If you don't want to set up a server yourself (for backups, e.g.), there are free hosting providers available; there's a comprehensive list on The Mercurial Wiki.
I would definitely recommend git
Works great for both big and small teams. Only drawback is poor native windows support. Although it works fine for me in Cygwin. There also exists a native windows port.
Some of its benefits:
Excellent support for a non-linear work flow. Its branching and merging is far better than eg Subversion.
Good tools to navigate your repository
Handles large projects well.
It is not possible to modify the history without changing the cryptographic signature of your repository
With its non monolithic design, it is easy to script.
Some people find that it has a steep learning curve. But once you understand it you can do almost anything you would want with it.
Go for subversion and tortoiseSVN, you don't need to set it up on a server.
Costs are zero
The subversion documentation is great and fun to read
tortoiseSVN is a very convenient client
Subversion has very low barrier to entry.
TortoiseSVN is a free client, and integrates into your explorer- i.e. in right mouse click menu.
The repository can be just a directory somewhere on your PC or on a network drive. Backing up just means zipping up this directory
There are a few plugins to Visual studio for Subversion, AnkSvn is one I have used, it is free and integrates nicely (i.e it will be smart about moving and deleting files etc)
Subversion is a good choice for one developer.
Update:
Since this post, I've been using Mercurial. It is a Distributed SVN. The 'distributed' aspect may not be directly useful to a sole developer, however it is better at merging and is somewhat faster. There is also a free and good Windows Explorer extension client - Tortoise Hg.
So in summary, if you are the sort of person who will work on many branches at once (doing spikes etc) or if you work on multiple PCs at once and would like full offline access to checkin history on both, then Mercurial. If you just want simple tracking and a well proven and easy to understand solution, then Subversion.
Sourcegear's Vault is a great option, it runs on SqlServer and it has been around for many years. I would not use any version of VSS (Visual Source Safe).
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Perforce. It's free for 2 people, blazingly fast, and integrates with VS. Also source server has bindings for it by default.
In addition to source control, it really is worthwhile to complete the loop and setup a symbol server and a source server, so that you have simple debugging of anything you've shipped (e.g. no more searching for pdbs or source that match the binary). Both source and symbol server are completely free and supported in VS since 2005.
You can use Vault from SourceGear, the replacement tool for visual studio source safe.
The IDE is integrated in Visual Studio.
The tool is free for single user.
More information: http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/index.html
I use Mercurial. It runs a treat running stand alone on my Vista development system with no other dependencies required. I use the command line but there's also TortoiseHG to integrate with Explorer.
Two comments:
There are other tools which probably integrate with VS better. I think Subversion has nice VS plug ins.
The benefit of a separate server is that it's a nice backup of all your work in case your HDD dies on you etc. so discount having one.
Edit: #Slartibartfast - if you just want to run source code control on a single machine a Distributed Source Code Control tool like git or Mercurial is ideal since they're designed to run complete repositories on a machine without the overhead of a server. The fact that you never connect your repository to anyone else's to push and pull changes doesn't mean that tool won't be right.
There are two possible solutions for your problem: centralized VCS or Distributed VCS (DVCS).
Centralized VCS like Subversion would satisfy you feature for committing and browsing the log. It also enables you to safely store your repository to another computer which should be one of your major goals as hard drive failure is always a possibility. However, using Subversion the history still resides only at the central location making it vulnerable and you stated that you do not want to have another server.
Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as Mercurial and Git enable you to do more complex operations on your repository. With both of those tools the whole repository resides with the same computer making it bit easier to make backups and using the repository with another computer e.g. laptop. While Mercurial might seem complex at first the operations you would use with subversion are pretty much the same with Mercurial. Therefore there is no extra overhead to get started if you already know Subversion and you can easily use more advanced features of Mercurial later.
You should be able to find online repository service for your Mercurial repository enabling you to make easy backups and do collaboration some day if you have the need for it.
My recommendation is Mercurial with TortoiseHg.
A source control system doesn't care if there's only one developer involved :)
I would recommend that you use a source control system that you've used before and liked.
If you like vs 2008 integration of the source control system however I would go with TFS although I never had the experience to set it up but it shouldn't be so hard.
Another possibility is to use svn (you'll find some servers on google) and use Tortoisesvn that integrates into the windows shell and is nice to work with.
A number of the posts advocate putting the repository on a server because it provides redundancy. I don't think this is all that helpful for a single user. Using a separate server machine adds a lot of complexity, but it doesn't buy much redundancy: if you lose the server machine, you still have the current sources on your development machine, but you may have lost ALL your history. Putting the repository on a server does make sense if that server is being regularly backed up. Using an exernal hosting service for the repository can provide storage redundancy, but you're at the mercy of the external service AND you need an internet connection to access the repository. If you use an external host, make frequent backups of the repository that you keep control of!
I would presonally recommend TortoiseSVN using a local file based repository. Just make sure you backup the local repository to a second machine or external media (such as CD-ROMs) on a regular basis.
I'd recommend two things:
First up, that other server - what happens if your machine dies? the house burns down? etc. Having it on another machine is a good idea from a redundancy point of view.
The second one is WHAT:
If you are very familiar with visual source(un)safe, think about SourceGearVault. It's VERY nice, very fast, and very much a vastly improved "clone" of VSS (ie works the same way from the users POV, not under the hood). Needs SQL server and windows tho (it's .NET + SQL server). Free for 1 user.
Of you are not, then I suggest you do one of two things:
First, get VisualSVN. It's great, works with VS2008 really well.
Second, if you MUST run it locally, get VisualSVN server (free!). Make sure you have a good backup plan. Runs on XP/2003/2008/Vista etc.It's just Apache + SVN, under the hood, so it just saves you on the setup - took me 5 mins to install and have it running.
OR, and I prefer this one:
go somewhere like Unfuddle, Dreamhost etc, and get hosting for SVN. It's private, it's fast, and most of all - it's OFFSITE. My dreamhsot account, with something crazy like 500GB of storage and 1-2TB of transfer/month costs about $6/month! There are others which do SVN hosting + bug tracking etc. Look around.
But yeah - SVN is the schizzzznit.you could create a local repository, but I like having a remote, backed up server.
TFS is total, utter overkill for 1 developer (or <5 IMO)
I realize that cost isn't a problem but a nice free solution that wouldn't involve checking in and out would be to host the code within Dropbox by doing this you'd instantly get versioning and backup which are the main features that a single developer system would provide.
Bazaar is a good version control system. I like to use it for my linux configs because you don't need to create a separate repo.
A while back I did a how-to blog post on using SVN with only one developer.
I called it Single serving source control
Well, for start, you don't need distributed one :)
I'm not sure what this physical part means, because you could put svn server on your own machine in little trouble.
On the other hand, NetBeans have local history module that logs all local changes of a file. Maybe something like that would be enough for you if Visual Studio have something similar.
I would recommend Subversion since it's for single developer and I assume that you're not doing complex merging and lots of log/history checking.
Seems like many people are using http://svnrepository.com/ for their hosting. It comes with Trac and even Git if you need it later.
Some good answers here.
I want to re-iterate the suggestion to use a separate computer to host the source control server, although it doesn't have to be a dedicated machine. It could be your Windows Home Server box, or some other server you're already running. Or it could be a virtual machine hosted on some other server. Whatever, just make it separate from the machine(s) where you write code.
I also want to suggest that you get a good backup discipline for your server. Something nightly at least; hourly if you can. Back up to a dedicated device (like an external hard drive) or something offsite (a server in your cousin's house in another state) or in the cloud (Amazon S3). Remember that your source code is your key asset; take care of it!
I've been working with Bazaar now for a few weeks and really like it. I'm a linux developer so don't really know much about Tortois but if you like it you should know that there is a Tortoisbzr
Hands down I would use git, and I believe many reasons why a single-developer would like to use git are hinted at or described in git magic
I use Springloops - version control tool for developers
SVN / Git version control
Automatic deployment to servers
Create repositories
Invite people
Import files
Great support
So, try Springloops
I dont see why the fact that your one developer changes anything on the source control issue. I would follow the same system (in fact I do on my solo projects). I use wush.net (svn and trac) in those cases. It's fast to set up and dont require that you yourself do or know any server issues. I recommend you use something like this.
I would recommend using subversion. Many have recommended using a seperate box as a server, in case your dev machine dies. What happens when the SVN server dies? The answer here is that no matter where you choose to run the server, ensure you always do frequent backups, possibly automated daily to some secondary, preferrebly offsite machine.
I use Perforce as well for my own personal stuff, mainly because we use it at work. There are emacs bindings for it as well, so you can sync, check stuff in or out, etc. all from within emacs.
I recently moved my studio from Subversion to Perforce and put some notes about it, sort of a postmortem, on my blog here. Hope it's useful.