Source Control - Why Bother?

I posted a while back concerning losing code and my paranoia in that respect. History Explorer helps me to revert to older code if I need to and if I mess up what I am doing. Source Control is a bit different. This is usually used by teams of programmers and allows them to work together on a single project without having people change code on something at the same time. Essentially a piece of code has to be checked out to change it and this means no one else can work on it until it is checked back in again. Another big plus is having two versions of the code. Now this affects me. I release a version of ADE (or some other program) and then start work on the next version. Bugs arrive and I am stuck with either having to modify the new code to release as a bug fix or fixing two sets of code. I have tried both and got suitably muddled up! Source control programs allow code to be branched. This means that is it possible to work on two parallel pieces of code. At some point these can then be merged back together to form a single version again. This is very useful. Source control also provides yet another back up repository for the code (never can have enough of those as long as they are suitably dated and annotated!)

There are a lot of heavy weight tools out there to do this including those based on CVS and SVN. I have tried several. Most require a good understanding of some arcane underlying commands although there are visual front ends such as Visual SVN for Visual Studio. Many need to be connected to a database server of some description either locally or on a web site somethere, There are a number of sites that provide free and paid for services.

Recently I even thought of writing my own but then I cam across Code Co-op from Reliable Software (www.relisoft.com). This does not use a central server nor rely on user to server communications. Instead it is a peer-to-peer system that uses email to transfer updates across the team. It means that each team member has a full set of code and it is therefore multiply redundant. As a team of one I don't need the cooperative stuff but I have found that it is simple to understand and integrates fine with Visual Studio. It is not cheap at $149 for the lite version and $199 for the pro. However I will be keeping it on as my source controller. It is definitely worth having and has already saved my bacon at least once!