At BinaryComponents we use Subversion  in conjunction with Tortoisesvn for our source control needs. With companies I've worked at before we've always used the Checkin / Checkout method when changing files, the idea being before you can change a file you must check it out, then once finished you check it back in again. Since both me and Stu work from home we needed a cheep or even better free, server based source control system we could both access from home, we opted for Subversion and haven't been disappointed.  With Subversion there's no concept of checking out and then checking in as you might have been accustomed with Source Safe or TFS, you just work on the files and then when your finished you can either see what files you've changed by looking at modifications or you can just commit them.

I've always in the past accepted as part of the job the initial pause on opening non-trivial Visual Studio projects as Source Control downloaded whatever information it needed to display checkout states etc. Throw in the more complicated source control options going from Visual Studio 6 to 7 it always felt like a bit of a bind especially when working disconnected. We didn't bother with Source Control bindings with Subversion, mostly because at the time I couldn't find any decent plug-ins, I was initially worried about having to remember to add files to source control that I'd created in Visual Studio but I haven't found this to be a significant problem.

With Subversion you have a server component and also a client side component in our case TortoiseSVN. Our Subversion server component sits on the server using Apache and WebDAV to communicate with TortoiseSVN which is a shell extension that fits seamlessly into explorer:

Downloading source from subversion using TortoiseSVN is simply a matter of checking out (initial download) the project into a directory and your ready to go, make changes to files and a little exclamation mark will appear next to file and its parent folders telling you the file is dirtied. You can then click on Check for modifications and all the changed files will appear in a dialog. Using TortoiseSVN in file explorer works really well for us. Tortoisesvn also has nice diffing tool built into it:

CodePlex and TFS

This brings me onto CodePlex a  open source hosting service which I use to share Superlist, a list control I wrote for FeedGhost that we've made available for all to share. The service uses Team Foundation Server, not surprising considering CodePlex is run by Microsoft. So I thought initially I had two choices when using its source control system, Visual Studio Integration and TeamPrise Explorer, both of which (out of the box) use the afore-mentioned checkout / Checkin methodology. After using both I plumped for Visual Studio even though it had the painful habbit of asking me for my username and password every time I opened a project.

Then a fellow developer pointed me to SvnBridge an awesome piece of software that tricks Tortoisesvn into thinking its communicating with Subversion, allowing me to use my favorite source control tool :-) I've also started to use VisualSVN which is a plugin for Visual Studio making use of Tortoisesvn menus that so far is working really nicely, you can see in the image below that it shows what files have changed as well. You can also access diffs of files as well as the standard source control commands you come to expect using TortoiseSVN. There is also no noticeable delay when starting Visual Studio and another boon is it doesn't ask if I want to work disconnected when I'm on my laptop with no connection...loooovellllly!

You'd have to drag me kicking and screaming before I would use any other source control solutions :-)