I encourage every one (even single developers) to use a Sourcecontrol system such as SVN and AnkhSVN to do development. Put all your project files (and external dependencies) under source control and maybe even get a continuous integration server setup.

And still, even if you’ve done all of this, chances are high you still have one external dependency in your project: the Database!

And this is where the pain starts, if you don’t find some way how to put your DB schema under source control too, you’ll end up going back to old versions and having no database of that date.

There are however several ways to solve this that I can think of:

• Make your CI server fetch a schema script every time a build is triggered.
• Make creating a schema script part of your build process

And .. guess what? There’s a simpler way :).
If you’re using a ORM tool you should always have your database model somewhere in the mapping files.

Because the mapping files tell the ORM the structure of the DB, they essentially contain all relevant information needed to generate a schema without the need to have SQL scripts.

In NHibernate for example, you can simply do a:

var cfg = new Configuration();
cfg.Configure();
cfg.AddAssembly(typeof (Person).Assembly);

new SchemaExport(cfg).Execute(false, true, false, false);

And the mapper will go out and create all necessary tables and relationships in your database.

By having an ORM capable of recreating the schema, I no longer need to keep the Database itself under source control, because the necessary information to recreate the schema is already in my source tree.

After playing around with Log4Net and the Castle MicroKernel, I suddenly discovered that not having those external dependencies under source control makes development quite difficult.

Whenever I update my dependencies, all other people on the team need to adjust theirs to match mine and vice versa. This is a minor annoyance while the team is small, once you grow and have people coming in and out of the team you’ll start to feel real pain!

If sucks even more if you’ve already shipped your application and get called a year later to change something. Trust me, digging up the right version of library X isn’t getting easier over time, and updating the application to a new version may either break the application or cause your customers to update too (both highly undesired!).

So, what’s the right solution to dependencies?
(No it’s not reinventing the wheel over and over again by writing everything by yourself)

Simple: Put the dependencies into a folder called /lib/ and reference them from there, set the “Copy To Output Directory” option to “Copy if newer”.
Then add this folder to your source control and you’re set. Whenever a new guy comes to the team and gets the project from source control, he’s guaranteed to be able to build it without having to run around some random site searching for referenced assemblies.