I Have Perforce Source Control Now

I had been wanting to get source control for my home hobby projects for the last couple of months. I am most familiar with Visual SourceSafe since I first used it 14 years ago (We use Team System now at work). I've been following eBay auctions to try to get VSS cheap, like say $50, but I hadn't had any takers for this price. Thankfully, I gave up on the stupid VSS idea, and after some research decided to give Perforce a try. It is free for up to two users, which is exactly the price I wanted to pay. It also integrates with Visual Studio 2008. Of all of the components on their download page, I only downloaded and installed these three 64-bit ones:

• P4D: Server
• P4V: Visual Client
• P4SCC: SCC Plug-in

The installs went smoothly. It wanted me to reboot, which I did. After rebooting, I went into the Perforce Visual Client P4V utility, then on the Tools / Administration menu I set myself up as a superuser. I accepted all of the defaults for everything, including the Workspace, which ended up being a problem later. I fired up Visual Studio and opened a solution that I wanted to add to source control. After opening the solution, I enabled the Source Control toolbar and selected Change Source Control.



This is where I ran into the only problem I had. When I tried to bind the solution to source control I got this error:

Path 'd:\Source\XLStoCSV/*' is not under client's root 'C:/Users/Alan/Perforce/EMACHINEST6520_1666/Alan_eMachinesT6520'.



I have a root folder where all of my programming projects are and figured that the problem was that I needed to make this be the root in source control. It was a little unclear how to do that though, but after some snooping around in P4V I found that I could edit the Workspace.



Earlier, I had accepted all of the defaults when setting Perforce up. I should have specified d:\source for my root.



After making this change, I went back to Visual Studio and retried binding the solution to source control. This time it worked just fine.



One more dialog came up to ask what to do if the files were already in source control. They weren't, of course, and I just took the default.



At this point, the icons on the project items were marked with the familiar yellow plus signs and could be checked in. Here's a screenshot of everything checked in. Elapsed time from download: 20 min. Very cool!