>>For programmers like myself who serve the SMB market and rarely have more than one developer working on a single project, VCS is a needless complexity.
>>Backups do the job.
>
>Hi Bill:
>
>I strongly disagree on that. I use VCS for all my personal projects on which I work alone, and making good use of VCS is one of the most powerful tools a developer have.
>
>I give you some examples on my use case:
>
>- If I want to add some new feature, I create a new branch and work in there, and do not merge it on main branch until it is finished or with some minimal testing
>
>- Sometimes I want to work on different tasks (features) or even on features and bugs, then a make a new branch for working on the bug. When finished, I merge into main and then apply the fix to other branches
>
>- I normally checkin code every time a get a minimal functionallity done, and if I make something wrong or I'm not sure what I've modified to get things not working, I just use the VCS to see the differences and in no time I can fix and continue
>
>- I can take out a merged feature if I find that it is not really useful or if it make more trouble than good
>
>- Because checking-in the code continuously while working, I have backups in time, every time
>
>- I can tell you what code I've changed 2 years ago when added some specific feature
>
>- I can go back to any point in time with a mouse click and analyze some changes in the code for doing better next time or for encapsulating code in a better way
>
>- When someone send me code by email for fixing something or for a new feature, I create a new branch and upload the new code to analyze the changes visually
>
>- I can keep going with many more things I do with VCS because it's one of the best things that happened to me as developer from the times that VFP 6 and SourceSafe.
>
>- An anecdote: I've contributed with some code changes to some VFPx projects, and from one of them the project leader asked me if I did changed a specific line in code, because it was causing an error. Because I did used VCS for working in this project, I could check all my modifications with a simple code comparison and found that this buggy line was there from the beginning, so was not mine.
>
>In summary, I'm in control of any aspect of the code I made, plus this way of working enables me to work with a team without changing habits.
>
>All of this allow a great level of confidence with the work done, and this is invaluable.
>
>
>How do you get all this adventages working alone without using VCS?

Hi Fernando
It's great the your VCS is working so well for you.

I have a different view about things like VCS.
I'm a pretty busy person with a fairly short memory and I like to be paid well for what I do, so when I put the effort into learning a technology I have to be sure that it will do something that I can bill to the customer that I couldn't do if I didn't have it.

As a result, I have a very sparse desktop.
The only tools I use are VFP, .NET, SQL Server and two add-ons.

I don't keep multiple versions of code around. My clients have the production versions. When I'm adding features I work with a test version and move it into production ASAP. If a client wants a change when I'm in the middle of another change, I tell them that they have to wait till the first change is finished. They must be OK with that because they pay me and keep asking for more features.


No one has ever offered to pay me for knowing whether I made a change two or three years ago. If enough of them did, I might be interested in a VCS.

The only not out-of-the-box VFP tool I use is XFRX.
The VFPX tools are interesting but I haven't had an instance where they meet the criterion above so I don't use any of them.
In the .NET world, the only not-out-of the box tool I use is a PGP tool that I bought because a customer needed to do PGP and I didn't see any other way of getting it done. Otherwise everything I do, I do with out-of-the-box tools that come with .NET.
Sure, lots of the custom controls are pretty slick, but I can usually figure out a way to use the basic product to do what I need more quickly than I can acquire and learn the tools.

I could spend the rest of my life trying to learn to use VFP, .NET and SQL Server at optimal efficiency and at the end probably wouldn't be half as effective as I should be.
Adding more things to the mix would only make that worse.

For sure, lots of very bright people see it differently but that's how I see it.