A few years ago, I asked Eric Sink why SourceGear had created a Single User version of SourceGear Vault. I had once worked in a team environment for 6 months and there we used source control, but as an independent developer, it had never occurred to me to use it. I thought of it as a tool for collaboratively working on code. Eric replied with this post and it all made perfect sense to me. But still I never did anything about it.
I finally got some hands on experience with SourceGear Vault this fall when working with a client that had three developers working together on an ASP.NET app. I had some help from fellow ASPInsider, Jeff Widmer, because I didn't think that the client should be suffering through my learning curve when I was working for them as a mentor. It was great to have a pro helping because it turned out that my client's scenario was far from typical. Shortly after this, I got involved in another project where we used source control to manage a collaborative documentation project. Here we are using SourceOffSite, another SourceGear product. I only had to set up the client app on my box while someone else manages the server.
So over the weekend, when I was working on some code and inadvertantly changed something that had been hard to get right the first time, I knew that my foolishness of not using source control to protect my work had to come to an end.
SourceGear no longer has a specific “single-user” version. Instead, as per the FAQs on their website,
Both Vault and Dragnet are free for use by a single user. Simply install the product and do not enter any serial numbers at all. When no serial numbers are present, Vault and Dragnet behave as if there is exactly one user license.
So I installed it on my XP machine which has IIS5 and SQL Server on it along with Visual Studio 2005. Since I also have Source OffSite on that computer, I learned that it was simple to switch back and forth between Vault and SOS being the default Source Control.
The beauty of this also is that if I do want to bring someone in on my project, it's just a matter of getting a few licenses and voila, there we go.
So it was really way too easy to get set up. Now I don't have to worry about messing up my code. What a dummy I was for waiting so long.