So far about 60 people have downloaded my little TiVo Decoder GUI program and I have received some suggestions for improvements from some fine folks at the TiVo forums. I'm currently working on the next version that will hopefully incorporate most of these improvements.

For the first time, I have decided to use a software configuration management tool to help me with this process. I decided to use Visual Source Safe 6.0d because I had purchased a copy at a computer show awhile ago and it integrates nicely with Visual Studio 2005.

One thing that surprised me was that it uses what is known as a “file-server” architecture instead of a “client-server” architecture. Basically, it stores the files (repository) on a network (or local) drive and you store and retrieve your files (check-in and check-out) by using a client program. The “server” described in the literature is just a SAMBA server if the files are stored on a network drive.

More sophisticated SCM tools use a database to store the files and you interact with it by using a client program to issue requests to a server program which then stores and retrieves your files from the database.

For my purposes (one man development team), Visual Source Safe is just fine. I don't need to set up a separate machine on my home network that is running a database and the SCM server. I can just install Visual Source Safe on my client machines and have the source code repository located on a network drive.

Anyways, I didn't know much about how to use a SCM tool to help with the development process. I took a Unix class once and we briefly read about CVS and I thought, “Wow, this is neat. It's much better than having different versions of your source code scattered all over your directories and then forgetting which version is the latest!”.

After that class, I have always wanted to use SCM because it seems like it would be extremely helpful. Surprisingly, we don't even use SCM where I work which made me want to use a SCM tool even more.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and use Visual Source Safe to manage my TiVo Decoder GUI project. But I needed a little tutorial that explains the concepts of an SCM tool and how to use one. I found a great site explaining SCM tools and wanted to share this with you.