The VCS Battle for Hearts and Minds of Developers

It shows just how things have changed since the internet came along that in a 28 year career, I only started using Version Control Systems (VCS) for developing software about 6 or 7 years ago. With one exception (British Aerospace in 1990), none of the places I worked at before the year 2000 used any kind of VCS and my first job was in 1981!

The availability of easy to setup servers (see setting up a subversion server ) means there really is no reason to not use one, even if there is just you. It's all to easy to lose a file or accidentally restore the wrong version from a backup. I bet I'm not the only person who had to get an undelete utility to recover an accidentally deleted file. All that can be avoided with a VCS as long as you backup the VCS files of course!

Now there are a lot of VCS to choose from and a recent trend (because of the internet) is to use distributed VCS such as Git, Mercurial, SVK, and Bazaar. I quite like the look of Bazaar which claims to be very easy to setup. I also love Subversion but a distributed VCS would make sense for me now even though it's written in Python not C C++ or C#. It's just another tool in the toolbox and I'm not excluding it because of the language it's written in. I've added it to the tools and resources page. I'm also learning Python to complement my other languages.

• Link to Useful Online resources
• Link to Tools and Utilities Library