Strongly Typed

I've used a few revision control systems (RCS) over the years. At IBM I used CMVC and CVS, at Xanga I used SourceGear's Vault and SubVersion, and while I was interning at SAIC/Demaco I even got a little experience with ClearCase. All of these are fine RCSs, each with its strengths and weaknesses. CMVC, at least in the way it was used at IBM, is an excellent cross-platform solution that does not only revision control but also defect tracking, build management, and will make you ice cream if properly configured (not really) - I hated it until I learned how to use it and then I loved it. CVS is probably the most widely used RCS and it's good at what it does, though it has some shortcoming around folder management, which is one of the reasons we have Subversion. Subversion is a solid tool that seeks to pick up where CVS left off and in my experience (on windows, using TortoiseSVN) it worked great. Vault, from SourceGear, is also another solid offering. And I don't remember much about ClearCase, so I won't comment on it.

The obvious omission here (to anyone doing Visual Studio development) is Visual Source Safe, which I can now say I've had the misfortune of using. I've read blog entries on how awful VSS is, talked to colleague who had bad experiences, and today I experienced my first extensive code-loss due to VSS. While it is entirely possible that the fault was mine and I clicked the wrong button, or didn't check the write box, or some other user error, I never had that problem with any of the other five RCSs I've used. That leads me to conclude that if VSS didn't outright do something wrong then the behavior of the app is so counter-intuitive that it might as well be wrong. While I don't relish redoing all my work the code that I'll end up rewriting will probably be written better; however, I can't quite bring myself to face the CSS files yet.

This is one of the reasons I can't wait for Apple's OS X Leopard and Timemachine. I would love to have a RCS for all my local files - not that it will help me out much with VSS, but if Apple does it now, Microsoft will probably release it in whatever comes after Windows Vista, though hopefully by then I won't be doing development on a Windows platform.