At CollabNet we have been discussing the differences and similarities between the Open Source community, and the Enterprise community. We want to be sensitive to that fine line between information awareness and marketing, without falling to one side or the other. Some people at CollabNet are hesitant to point to anything that costs money to the Open Source community for fear of offending, yet much of the content could indeed be very useful in shortening that learning curve.

As someone who is also helping to maintain the CollabNet site, and as Community Manager, I needed to learn what I needed to know as quickly as possible. I am not only learning to use Subversion, but I’m also learning to use the collaborative tools provided by TeamForge.You can see the tools of CEE if you look at any project on openCollabNet. We will be upgrading the site to TeamForge in the future.

Yes, we eat our own dog food, so to speak, and I’m glad. I have been impressed with the functionality and the ease of use of this platform compared to others I have used. To shorten my learning curve I have found some great training through articles, white papers, webinars, and web courses.

It is my hope that the resources I list below help to shorten your learning curve, no matter whether you want to stick with only the free materials or the ones that we charge for.

For those of you who are Subversion experts, you can stop reading here, though I value your opinion and experience and would appreciate any comments or suggestions you’d like to make. Also, some of you may not be aware of the variety collaboration tools that TeamForge provides.

Newsletters

Many bypass this option when registering for CollabNet, but the newsletter can point to useful information about learning Subversion, as well as other content you might not want to miss. You can subscribe by clicking on your user name at the top of the CollabNet site. Once in your profile, scroll down and click the Newsletter box. Or you can read the archived newsletters.

Webinars

Webinars are a great way of seeing software in action, and hearing information about the tools. Be sure to be logged into the site so you don't need to fill in any forms.

• What's New in Subversion 1.6
• Subversion Best Practices
• CollabNet TeamForge The Power of Centralization

Discussion Forums

Discussion forums are an excellent place to ask questions that fellow developers and users can answer. Be sure to return the favor by answering the questions when you can provide solutions based on your own experience. You'll need to be logged in to participate.

• Subversion for Admins
• Subversion End Users & Developers

Release Notes, Data Sheets, and Articles

We also have some good notes, data sheets, and articles. Be sure you are logged in so you needn't fill out contact information.

• Subversion 1.6
• Browsing a Subversion or CVS Repository
• CollabNet Subversion Datasheet
• CollabNet Training for Subversion

Training Courses

CollabNet offers a complete, role-based training curriculum across the entire CollabNet product line. Courses are delivered in a number of formats to best meet your education needs.

Subversion 1.5 - Individual Modules:

• Subversion 1.5 for Developers - Section 01 - Introduction to Version Control (10 min) - $28
• Subversion 1.5 for Developers - Section 02 - Introducing Subversion (19 min) - $28
• Subversion 1.5 for Developers - Section 03 - Global Revisioning and Working Copies (21 min) - $38
• Subversion 1.5 for Developers - Section 04 - Standard Work Cycle (33 min) - $38
• See More . . .

Instructor Led Courses

• Subversion 1.6 for Developers - Standard
• Subversion 1.6 for Developers - Enterprise
• Subversion 1.6 for the 1.x Developer
• Subversion 1.6 for Administrators
• See More . . .

FAQs

FAQs are probably one of the best free resources you can read for learning about Subversion.

• Subversion Client FAQ
• Subversion Server FAQ
• Subversion Migration FAQ

As I discover more resources for learning Subversion and TeamForge, I will write new blogs, and add to the newsletter as I discover.

Enjoy your Subversion learning path!

I added a post on my personal blog yesterday about support for Subversion being available for the just released Eclipse 3.5/Galileo release. Today I am going to show just how easy it is to install support for Subversion in Eclipse 3.5.

While I think that installing plugins in Eclipse is generally a pretty easy process, my views on this are colored by the fact that I have been doing it since before Eclipse 1.0 came out. That said, the Eclipse Mylyn team has made the process super-easy in the Eclipse 3.5 release.

I started by downloading one of the Eclipse packages from the download site. I chose the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers, just make sure you get one of the options that includes Mylyn.

After unzipping the bundle and starting Eclipse, look for the Mylyn Task List view and click on the New Task button as shown here:



This brings up the following Mylyn wizard. Note the new option to install more connectors:

After clicking the "Install More Connectors" button you are presented with a list of connectors that Mylyn can install. In the list of connectors that has been certified by Tasktop, you will see the CollabNet Desktop for SVN. The CollabNet Mylyn connectors, including Subclipse and our graphical merge client, have been certified by the team at Tasktop.  That means that these plugins play well with others and can be properly integrated into a number of Eclipse-based IDE's. Subclipse is the only Subversion plugin to have been certified by Tasktop.



I checked the box for the CollabNet Desktop for SVN and click Finish.

Three clicks, and I have started the process for installing Subversion support into Eclipse, it does not get much easier than that!

At this point, the rest is handled by the install magic from the Mylyn team. They run through the Eclipse install mechanism to verify and install your selections. I was doing this just after the launch of Eclipse 3.5 and I am sure the mirrors were getting hammered. Whatever the process does initially to validate the dependencies to verify the install took a few minutes, but eventually the following dialogs came up and it is just a matter of clicking through the wizard to complete the install. For completeness, here are those dialogs:

Confirm your selections and click Next:

I expanded the selection, so that you can see all of the components that will be installed.  You get the CollabNet Desktop, which allows you to connect to any CollabNet hosted site.  Subclipse, and its required components.  The Subversion revision graph feature that I have blogged about previously, and the CollabNet Merge client, which makes merging easy and powerful from the Eclipse environment.

Accept the licenses. All of these products are free and open-source, licensed under the EPL.

And finally, just click Yes to restart Eclipse.  That is it, not only do you have a working Subversion client in Eclipse, you have one with all of the bells and whistles as well as one that has been certified by Tasktop.

One Caveat!

The above install was done on Windows Vista 32-bit.  If you are running on another operating system, you must have the Subversion 1.6.x native libraries, including the JavaHL library available.  CollabNet provides an installer for OSX that includes this library, as well as a Linux client RPM that should work on any Linux distro.  Windows 64-bit users can install the SlikSVN package.  All of this information and more is available in this FAQ about JavaHL.