Tortoise SVN for TFS: Making the real thing work and a clone

Buck Hodges

May 31st, 20070 0

Periodically, the topic of having a Tortoise SVN-like client for TFS comes up. The CodePlex team announced yesterday that they are writing a free “bridge” to make the real Tortoise SVN work with TFS. It’s an interesting approach.

CodePlex to support TortoiseSVN

The number one new feature request from users is for CodePlex to support Subversion. Specifically what users are telling us they want is the features and experience they get when using TortoiseSVN as a source control client. It is important to us on the CodePlex team to provide our users the features they want and need to have the best experience possible, and so we will soon be offering support for using TortoiseSVN with CodePlex.

Our release date for offering TortoiseSVN support is June 18th. Note that this is a revised date from June 5th to give additional time for development and testing.

We plan to offer TortoiseSVN support by creating a “bridge” that emulates a Subversion server and converts the requests from TortoiseSVN into calls to Team Foundation Server. We want to offer users the ability to use the source control tools of their choice with the most flexibility possible, and we chose this approach because it offers the following benefits:

Users can choose to use either TortoiseSVN, the CodePlex Client, Teamprise Explorer, or Visual Studio Team Explorer with any project

All existing and new projects will immediately support using TortoiseSVN as a source control client

Existing projects will not need to go through any type of migration to support TortoiseSVN

New projects do not have to choose what source control clients they will support since all clients will automatically be supported

We will be releasing the “bridge” software as an open source project on CodePlex.

Ben Day has written his own “clone” of Tortoise SVN. It’s not free, but I’d be curious to know what you think of it if you’ve tried it out.

Want to access TFS source control from Explorer.exe? Announcing “Dubbelbock TFS”!

Ever heard of Tortoise SVN? It’s a great tool that lets you control Subversion source control from Windows Explorer. Right-click on a file or folder and you can do operations like check-in, check-out, add, etc.

I use Team Foundation Server for my source control and have missed the convenience of being able to access source like that. So, I wrote it.

This is the official announcement of “Dubbelbock TFS“. With Dubbelbock you can select a directory or file and do “Get Latest“, “Check in“, “Check out“, “Lock“, “Add“, “Undo“, “View Status“, “Compare to Server Version (diff)“, and “View History“.

Download the trial version here. The trial is good for 30 days and a single user license is available for only $25.00.