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Banana jump, Barrel Kick(BJBK) 2: TortoiseSVN, Version control.

The second chapter of Banana jump, Barrel Kick(BJBK) will talk briefly about TortoiseSVN.

Ofer Rubinstein, Blogger

October 30, 2009

3 Min Read

TortoiseSVN is a free client for Subversion version control system. In respect to the lone programmer, version control saves a version of your source code or project each time you commit your project. You then can checkout or get a local copy of any version of your project you committed in the past. I will be using TortoiseSVN for BJBK.
The first place to go is the TortoiseSVN homepage. There you can find the Download Page and download TortoiseSVN. I downloaded the 64bit version.
Installation is pretty straight forward. After you install TortoiseSVN, I suggest reading the Help from the beginning. That is what I did.
A point of confusion, at some point the Help will tell you about using commands from the command prompt in windows. However, you will need to install the Subversion Command Line client in order for this to work. The download can be found here.
The steps I took to start using TortoiseSVN were to read the Help up to and including "The Repository". There you will learn how to create a repository. I used the import command to create the folders structure. You can read the daily user guide to better understand how to use TortoiseSVN. But I think for starting out you only need to know how to Checkout and how to Commit.
Checkout is the process of creating a local copy from the repository. You need to create a new empty folder in windows explorer, then right click that folder and select checkout. Then you need to provide the repository address. If you already did the tutorials of a 2D game in XNA, as I recommended in BJBK1, you would have a C# project inside a specific folder. You can copy that C# project inside your local copy of the repository, and then right click the local copy folder and select Commit. You will then be asked which files you wish to commit. You should select the minimum files in your XNA game project required to build and run your game. I believe these should be all the .cs, .csproj, your artwork and resources files, the Content folder, and the solution file (.sln). The reason you shouldn't commit the temporary build files, is because there might be a problem when someone else work with you on the same project. This might not be the case in this project, but you should get used to working like that. I must tell that I don't have a lot of experience working like this, and I am telling you what I was told by others. But it make sense to me.
The final step would be to create a new folder in a different place in order to checkout another local copy of your project. This time with the XNA project you committed. You should do this to check you can build and run what you have committed.

That's it, I hope next time we can start seeing some code. But before that I might need to research what type of license or agreement to choose for the source code I am going to show.

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