Team Development with Built-in Source Control

In most scenarios, development on a business application is shared between a set of developers. For concurrent development (when multiple developers are working on the same project), it is typically ideal to utilize a Source Control Management (SCM) environment for team development. Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Developer and later versions provide a copy of the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe SCM toolset, which is tightly integrated with Visual Studio .NET. Basically, when a team lead developer has initiated a project, he or she can add the project to Source Control by using File, Source Control, Add Solution to Source Control. After the project is "checked in" to the source control repository, all the files of the project automatically become read-only and developers have to explicitly check out files that they are going to edit, preventing other developers from accidentally overwriting them. After the developers have finished their part, they can check in the file (see Figure 5.42) to the common repository for other developers to use or work on. Based on permissions, read-only access is always available to all files.

Figure 5.42. Visual SourceSafe-based source control integration.