Here's my current development environment.

4Gb Dual core laptop running Windows 7 64-bit. I plan to upgrade to a quad core later this year.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 for devleopment, but release builds are still done with VS2008.

I'm using a productivity tool called CodeRush from DevExpress.

I'm using TFS for my source code control and bug tracking. I used Visual SourceSafe before that, and SVN for a short time. I'm using TFS at work, and it also does bug tracking, so I'm happier with it.

My backups are being done right now wilh Microsoft 'Live Mesh' I'm backing up TFS, I'm also backing up my development directory, and several other directories. These backups are going both to three other machines on my home netowrk, and also up to 'the cloud.' Live mesh gives you a free 5 Gigabyte account which has been enough. I also pull off DVDs about once a month. The TFS backups are daily, and the backups of my development directory are near real-time.

Here's one reason I swithced over to TFS. I can now do reports like this instead of keeping noted in 'readme' files. I can also like match each one of these changes to the files and lines of code which I changed in order to fix them.

Before, i didn't really have this link. I know that 119 fixed these three items, but I couldn't tell which files were changed for that fix, except in general. It means that I'm hoping it's less likely for me to forget to make a change, and to make it easier to be able to fixure out what I changed when I make a mistake. I feel like it's saving me time over reading and editing files to keep track of this stuff.

Release State       Reason Title
119       Resolved Fixed     Lockups in unit screen
119       Resolved Fixed     Allow you to turn off PNG files support
119       Resolved Fixed     Editor/unit report/deployment closes unit dialog

If anyone is setinng up their own TFS system, there are a couple of things to know.

You're going to have to learn a bit of SQL Server in order to put the data files in a reasonable location (NOT C:\Program files which is the default).

You're going to have to set up a scheduled task to do backups.

If you've got a lot of binary files, keep the binary files in a separate 'Collection'. I've got one collection for all the graphics, and a separate one for the daily code. I do this so that I can do reasonable sized backups on a regular basis.

Nobody cares except for the three hate mails that I'm going to get, but I'm switching from SVN to Basic TFS.

I store copies of all the source code, tracing back to when I got access to the code, that's called SCCS, SCM, and probably some other acronyms. That means that I can see exactly what changes I've made to the code over time.

SVN is a fine product, but for some reason I kept getting errors about needing to execute the cleanup command, and got frustrated by what I needed to do to fix the issues I was having. I was also having some display issues linked to using 64-bit windows.

By switching to TFS basic, I also get to add and attach bugs to specific code changes, something that isn't possible with SVN by itself, and which will help me down the road when I want to know why I did something. I know that I can get bugzilla or other products to get the same functionality, but this is also what I'm using at my day job, so it makes my life a bit easier.

Ralph