Version control systems are fundamental collaboration tools for teams of developers. And the benefits of being able to save incremental changes to development projects cannot be over-stated for individual developers. Thankfully Eclipse, and by extension the Force.com IDE, support all the most popular version control systems. With just a few moments of effort, your Force.com application can be stored and shared in a version control system of your choice.

The following video demonstrates using the Force.com IDE and the Subclipse plug-in to connect to a Subversion repository:

Put Your Force.com App Under Version Control Video

You could install and maintain your own on premise version control system like CVS or Subversion, but there are many on-demand providers who will do this for you. Some of them, like Google Code and SourceForge.net, are offered free to open source projects. Others, such as CollabNet and ProjectLocker, offer private project hosting for a fee.

The Force.com IDE makes adding a project to version control so easy, that there’s hardly any excuse not to do it.

Happy versioning!