A while ago Mitch posted about the AnkhSVN plugin for [VS2005] and that he thought that it would be better than using the explorer addin, TortoiseSVN. After using both for a couple of months now I don’t quite agree. Unfortunately while the AnkhSVN plugin does a great job of checking files in, displaying diffs etc where it fails down is keeping the solution explorer up to date. Quite frequently I’ll open up solution explorer and notice that files which I know are under subversion control aren’t marked as such. Doing a refresh on the folder or expanding to show all files is enough to trigger a refresh of the plugin so that it fixes the display. The problem is that when I go to commit changes I typically click on the solution node and select commit – forgetting that some of the files might not be correctly picked up by the plugin. As such there have been occasions when only part of a change have been committed. Now I just go back to windows explorer for my commits!
One nice feature I just noticed with the plugin is that it extends the properties that are visible when you click on a file.
The first 6 properties are the standard properties that you would expect to see in the properties grid when you select a file in solution explorer. The rest of the properties are pulled from the subversion file information. For example you can see who was the last author to check in the file, what revision the file was at and what the uri of the subversion repository is.