Twin Cities Code Camp

Distributed source control systems have become popular in the last several years, but they have just recently gained popularity in the .NET/Windows space. CodePlex, Microsoft's open source code hosting website, recently added support for Mercurial as an alternative to Team Foundation Server(TFS). This is an exciting change for people wanting to take advantage of a distributed source control tool. In this talk I'll introduce you to TortoiseHg which is a Windows shell tool for interacting with Mercurial. We'll cover the basic command-line options like init, clone, push, pull, log and status. Then we'll examine how to perform the same actions with hgtk commands, which offer clean graphical interfaces to perform the same actions. In the second part of the talk we'll look at how to use branching and merging well. And we'll finish up by discussing what makes distributed source control different from centralized systems like Subversion and how it can change your source control workflow.