Assembla’s free Subversion service within a CloudShare SharePoint development environment (as posted on Rene Modery’s blog)
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Post from Rene Modery’s Blog – How to use Assembla’s free Subversion service within a CloudShare SharePoint development environment.
After being tempted by CloudShare for a while now, I finally went ahead and got a subscription. One of the reasons for this is that I want to be able to do some SharePoint/Office 365 development wherever I am, even if my laptop is not with me (basically, that currently means that I do it from either my laptop at home or my laptop at work). To keep my code separate from my virtual machine, I signed up for the free Subversion service from Assembla, and put all my relevant code (also the one I’m working on inside my CloudShare environment) into repositories hosted there.
The benefit of this is that if I stop using CloudShare, want to develop inside my own local virtual machine, rebuild my ClousShare environment, start developing in multiple machines, or other similar reasons, I can easily access my code repository again, anytime & anywhere (I could even share it with others, if I wanted to). Following are the simple steps to set it all up:
- Does it work with other Subversion repositories? – Yes, but as I use Assembla, I focus on it here.
- Does it work for non-SharePoint code as well? – Yes, I just use it as an example (again, because I’m using it)
- Can I use Assembla in my own environment (local VM, e.g.) – Of course!
Sign up for Assembla
I will skip the detailed section of how to do this, there’s nothing special or magical about it. Go to http://offers.assembla.com/free-subversion-hosting/, sign up, that’s it.
Install your favorite Subversion tool for Visual Studio
There are many Visual Studio plu-ins thaz can be used with Subversion, I chose the free tool AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) for my development purposes. Download it, install it. To configure it in VS, go to Options, Source Control, and Plug-in Selection.
Add a new project
When you create a new project, you have the option to select “Add to Subversion”.
If you do so, an extra dialog will pop up after the project has been created.
Add to Subversion
After you click OK,you’re asked for the Repository URL. You can get it from your Assembla subversion site:
Paste it, select an appropriate local folder, and if desired select if a trunk folder should be created.
Once you click OK, you will get to see your solution in the Solution Explorer, together with the corresponding Subversion icons (as you can see from the blue “plus”, these are new files that haven’t been committed to the repository yet)
Confirm your changes
Right-clicking on an individual file/folder/module/project/solution/etc., you will have the option to commit the corresponding changes to subversion.
Once you do so, you can still select which items you want to commit, and add a log message:
View your repository on Assembla
Once you’ve committed your code, you can also view the folder and file structure directly on the Assembla site:
Having multiple repositories on Assembla
You are not restricted to a single Subversion repository on Assembla, you can create multiple repositories (called spaces) if wanted:
Viewing the activity stream
When you log on to Assembla, you can also see the activity stream of all Space,s and check what has happened recently (your actions as well as those of anyone else who has access to your space(s))
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