TFS and SourceSafe Alternative

October 21, 2007

I kindly enjoyed using TortoiseSVN lately as part of my personal software development experience. Since TortoiseSVN is more of a Windows Explorer Plugin, I find it very limited. That is why I looked for a tool that in a way will integrate it with Visual Studio. The first that I was able to find in the internet was VisualSVN. It was a great tool but not for free. Then, through MSDN (wow from Microsoft), I found ANKH.

Well, I kinda admit that this software is a little bit buggy, but I find it very useful. It comes with a plugin for Solution Explorer which emulates (if that is the term) the menus from VisualSourceSafe (VSS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). So that would mean to say I could commit my changes to SVN Repository without having to go Windows Explorer and do it from there. What is also cool is that it comes with Diff tool. This is similar to Compare of TFS and VSS. One thing, it also got Repository Explorer which allows user to manually edit folders from the Repository.

I am not suggesting that this software is far more better than VSS and TFS, but I could say this is a very good alternative. It is currently under BETA, so once it is release, I expect more from it.