How do you do version/source control in SharePoint?

Question

How do you do version/source control in SharePoint Visual Studio projects (I'm using 2010)? Can it be connected to SVN, for example? I'm new to SharePoint.

Answer 1

Since SharePoint projects (code for customizations) can be seen as 'normal' coding project at some point, you can use a versioning system like SVN. I'd go for a combination of VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN as other suggest if you want to stick with SVN.

However for SharePoint development (more than regular .NET development) I prefer to go with TFS instead of SVN, since it's a smoother experience in my opinion. If you're in a decent .NET development company, they possibly have a TFS server set up already, or at least have access to it through their MSDN account (and TFS2010 is a walk in the park to set up).

If you're talking about version control of pages that you change on the SharePoint site itself (or on documents), that's taken care of SharePoint. No need for source control there. Only be sure to back up the databases.

Answer 2

SVN is simply source control for files - an example of this would be TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/). You would create your customisations for SharePoint using Visual Studio and then check these files into source control. You would not normally add any of the SharePoint files or databases into source control - only the customisations you create using Visual Studio.

Also be aware when using VisualSVN with VS2010 and SPI's (SharePoint Project Items) - we have seen issues where some items are not added by default to source control and you need to add these manually.

Answer 3

We use SVN for our SharePoint 2010 project, basically we just structure the code as normal and then check it in to SVN, just like any other code. Nothing special really required. We use Tortoise as the client although you could use a Visual Studio plug-in to make things easier.

Answer 4

VisualSVN is a Subversion plug in for Visual Studio.