I’m used to using SubVersion with Tortoise SVN plugged into Windows Explorer and Ankh SVN as my Visual Studio version control integration. With Tortoise I can rename a folder and the change will be picked up, I can add new folders and delete folders and these changes will also be detected; and because Ankh SVN has the same features as Tortoise SVN I can do all of these things in the Visual Studio solution explorer too.
StarTeam doesn’t seem to do this. If I add a new folder in Windows Explorer I don’t expect my Visual Studio integration to pick it up, but I do expect the StarTeam client to pick it up, but it doesn’t. If I rename a folder in Visual Studio the plugin detects it, but I can’t see how to rename a folder in the StarTeam client. If I delete a folder in the Solution Explorer of Visual Studio then the plugin will register a delete operation for all of the files within the folder but not for the folder itself.
So it seems that as long as I am changing things within folders StarTeam copes okay; but if I want to delete a folder I have to remember to log into the StarTeam client, find the orphaned node in the version control project, and delete it manually. Worse still, if I add a new folder with Windows Explorer then StarTeam won’t tell me that there is a folder not in the version control view. I have to remember I added the folder (which might not happen if I have added it as part of a larger set of changes), find it’s parent node in the version control view, right-click the parent node to add the folder.
This is terrible! Version control clients are supposed to be there to save me from having to remember all my changes and manually register them with a server. In addition to this, unless I am wrong it seems that in the StarTeam client you cannot register a set of delete operations + new file operations + content changed operations in a single check-in.
Give me Subversion + TortoiseSVN + AnkhSVN any day!