I just gave SourceGear Vault a go. It looked pretty cool, although it has the feel of a beta product. Here are some notes. This isn’t intended as criticism, rather as a bug report.

• The installation was a little tricky, but that was mainly because I didn’t have all the dependencies at the right time. The Vault installer wouldn’t let me install until I had MSSQL and IIS going, but it happily installed without ASP.NET, but then complained that the ASPNET account didn’t exist. I created it manually and the install finished fine, but then the server wouldn’t go because I didn’t have ASP.NET. Installing that got it working fine.

• The first time I tried to connect with the client, I got a message box saying “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” after selecting File | Choose Repository. Creating a repository fixed that.

• http://localhost/VaultService/bin/userGuide.chm didn’t seem to work; I got an HTTP 403 error. I could get to the manual at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\VaultService\bin\userGuide.chm though. This may have something to do with the ASPNET user not being there at the right time.

• There are check boxes in the admin and client tools to turn on CVS-like behaviour (edit/merge/checkin rather than VSS’s checkout/edit/checkin), but apparently this doesn’t work (“CVS Style is not supported in 1.0.”). Or does it work if I don’t use the Visual Studio integration? I like Visual Studio’s “show pending checkins” display — can I get something similar to this if I use the standalone client?