Windows Subversion Environment

This articles describes the installation and configuration of SubVersion on Windows and its primary audience is intended to be developers wanting to build a local SubVersion development environment and covers:

1. Installing Subversion on a Windows Server (5 min)
2. Installing Visual Studio and Monodevelop integration into Subversion (5 min)
3. Installing Windows Explorer integration into Subversion (5 min)
4. Installing CLR Bindings for development against Subversion (10 min)

The article does not compare and contrast the various tool choices available, but it does record the results of my analysis into the tool-set available. This blog post will not be deprecated if my choices change, instead it will be updated in place so you are safe in linking to it if you simply want to benefit from my efforts.

Subversion Installation on Windows

How to get a local developer Subversion installation, and configure bindings to begin integration of your code projects into Subversion.
There are many options for installing Subversion on Windows. Being a Unix application, subversion does not have a good Windows installation experience. But, being an Apache V2.0 license, third parties are welcome to integrate the product into their own products and some have done a wonderful job of it. On Windows I always use VisualSvnServer because it has everything I need and I can set it up in 5 minutes.

• Install from here
• I recommend enabling Windows Account integration unless you are setting up a server that you want to share with Linux and OSX machines.

The post installation result is satisfyingly familiar interface that will have you productive in no time.

Integration into Visual Studio

For Visual Studio integration I use AnkhSVN. There are other options including onefrom the makers of VisualSVNServer, but these are not free and my requirements include price and functionality. AnkhSVN works as well as any other Microsoft supplied Version Control client so I have never looked at the for-pay products largely because I never had the need.
After installation you will need to startup Visual Studio and select the Source Control Provider (Tools->Options…) …

Integrate into Monodevelop

I use Monodevelop for cross-platform CLR development. Its useful to have a Windows installation with Monodevelop. By default it installs with Git support, to add subversion to to Tools->Add-in Manager->Gallery.

Integration into Windows Shell

Windows Shell integration is required unless you enjoy command line interfaces. The broad consensus is that TortoiseSvn is the best client to use.

Integrate C# / CLR Applications into Subversion

SharpSvn by the makers of AnkhSvn is the library to use for CLR Subversion integration. There are a large number of well respected commercial and free projects using it which gives the library the credentials we want. As usual, it meets the price (free) and functional requirements.
You need to know the version of SubVersion you installed when you installed VisualSvnServer. The version installed circa 9-15-11 is 1.6.9. To make sure, open a command prompt and enter ‘svn –-version’.
Download and extract the SharpSvn libraries into your project folder. There are two downloads, be sure to get the correct libraries as the these contain both managed and unmanaged libraries which means you need to be architecture aware (x64 v.s. ia32).
Documentation is online and comprehensive and you can find it here...

But you will need more than that. The documentation is not entirely complete and the downloads lack useful examples, unit tests or sample projects. To get these items you will need to get the source hive and peruse through it.
This page gets you the latest command to check out SharpSvn.
‘svn checkout http://sharpsvn.open.collab.net/svn/sharpsvn/trunk SharpSvn-Source --username guest’
The folder SharpSvn-Source\src\SharpSvn.Tests contains our useful examples, easily referenced by operation type.