As I’ve said in other posts, I tend to use Eclipse for the bulk of my C development, along with Java and Perl. There are two places where Visual Studio is, for me, an absolute necessity.

1. Running the debugger: we compile the Windows versions of our apps using the native Microsoft compilers, which Eclipse CDT debugging doesn’t yet support. So to run the debugger, I switch into Visual Studio. This is the one place where I wish the Eclipse debugger keyboard shortcuts matched Visual Studio’s (yes, I know I can remap them, just haven’t done it yet!).
2. C# development. In the last year or so, we’ve been working hard on our Microsoft integrations, through the MSBuild API on the client side, and a Visual Studio Addin. Here it would be crazy to attempt to use Eclipse.

However, I still need to check into CVS, which is trivial to do from Eclipse, but not natively supported in Visual Studio. I was back to the bad old days of switching out of Visual Studio to Windows Explorer and firing up TortoiseCVS or WinCVS … until I found TamTam CVS.

TamTam CVS is a great little ($10) add-on to Visual Studio that provides, as Dave says:

… a Microsoft Source Code Control (MSSCCI) compliant implementation that seamlessly integrates Concurrent Versions System NT (CVSNT) client with Microsoft Visual Studio / Visual Studio.NET 2002/2003/2005, MatLab, FoxPro, 3D Studio Max and other MSSCCI compliant applications.

I’m also using it in Visual Studio 2008.

TamTam “just worked” when I installed it, giving me 95% of the functionality I wanted right away. I felt there was one feature missing (the ability to store “template” commit comments, which we use to link commits back to the issues that we are fixing), and I asked Dave if that feature were possible. He added it in under a week! (See version 1.2.1). Thanks Dave!

For $10, less than you might spend on lunch, you’re avoid tons of seemingly minor annoyances that really add up during the day. And the support was excellent. I haven’t used TamTam SVN, but I bet it’s of similar quality.

– Jim