Just a general question I would love some opinions on. How do you all manage having products "out there" in different flavors and versions as well as a version under development?

Basically I am trying to figure out a better way to have a given version of a given program preserved while I move on with development. For instance, I publish and distribute a version of an application, lets call this version 1. To support version 1's userbase I need to have a copy of that code, database, and other pieces that make up my application so I can debug here if necessary. Now I have version 1.5 in development that has some simple, and some not so simple changes to all the assets of version 1. See where I am going. It was easy in VFP, (inzip your application folder and you were good to go), with .NET, SF, DDT, BO projects, security projects, version control, etc I am just not sure what is the best way to go as we start having some more stuff out there in he world in different flavors and versions to support.

This is probably something some of you take for granted and I would appreciate your opinions. I have several products now that I have to maintain the environment described above.

Keith Chisarik

I forgot my last requirement, it needs to be cheap/free

But seriously, as always thanks for the great posts, Ill be checking out my options soon.

Keith Chisarik

Hey Keith.

Sourcegear Vault is free for 1 user.

Subversion is open source and free...for as many users as you need. I'm using it with apache, remotely. Not the easiest to get working, but doable. Once it is setup, I've had not problems at all. Works great.

Here's my penny and a quarter (inflation has taken it's toll on the value of two cents  ):

http://www.visualsvn.com/server/

I hadn't realized that VisualSVN had a server package. Nice. I use VisualSVN for integration within Visual Studio and it works great.

Any of these will take some energy to implement, but just be sure that you are on a solid platform and doing something that is reliable.  Greg has been using Subversion for a while now so I am sure that he has gone through most of the heartache, so if he recommends it, then I am sure it would be a good fit since it is free