Having control over your source files using a Version Control System can be a really good thing. Then you can always go back and look at changes you’ve done in your code, and that can be really useful when tracking down bugs. If your application stops working and you can’t find what bug is causing it, you can try and run older versions of it until you find the change in the code that was causing the problem. It’s also good when you are several developers working on the same project, since the version control handles check-outs and commits of source files and you have tools to merge code when you’ve been working on the same files.

The most popular open source Version Control System is CVS. I’ve tried it, but I don’t really like it, it’s kind of messy to set up for personal use, especially on a windows system. Instead, I recommend that you use Subversion, it’s actually based on CVS but with many annoyances fixed. There is a really good Subversion module available for Netbeans, so you can use the Version Control directly from within your favourite IDE.

One thing though, if you’re using Netbeans on Windows and want to use the Subversion module, you currently have to specify the path to your subversion installation on the command line when you start up Netbeans. Just add the argument

-J-Dsubversion.path=”C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin”

to your favourite Netbeans shortcut and it should work fine.