Question

I am looking for TFS free alternatives to manage source code. I ve worked with CVS and SVN. I know GIT and Mercurial, but I still haven´t worked with them.

I would to use anyone of them integrated with Visual Studio, with the same ease which use TFS (Solution Explorer contextual menu, a dockable source explorer, etc).

Do you know free plugins to do this?

Answer 1

I would highly suggest using Mercurial.

With visual studio, there is a free plugin http://visualhg.codeplex.com/.

In addition, there is a windows shell package you can install called tortiseHG which makes it super easy to deal with Mercurial in windows. http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/

There are other plugins that you can use for SVN and GIT.

For GIT, you might use msysGIT, which again has nice shell integration features:
http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

As well as visual studio extensions
http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

For SVN, there is AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

If you havent used alot of SCM’s, I would highly recommend trying out Mercurial. Distributed SCM’s are quickly becoming the optimal way to deal with source control. It’s just the right way to do things.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started if you are interested in Mercurial:

Excellent tutorial by Joel Spolsky:
http://hginit.com/

Thorough coverage of Mercurial features:
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

Best of Luck.