This is part duex in the series Living with Subversion, starting to get into the nit-n-gritty. 

Configure your software

After you install TortoiseSVN and SGV's Client, you will want to configure TortoiseSVN for a number of things.  You will access this by right-clicking on your empty desktop, going to TortoiseSVN, and then to Settings.

TortoiseSVN's Context Menu for Settings

Exclude files you do not want to check-in
These includes directories to ignore such as /bin, /obj, /_sgbak, and files such as *.suo, *.pdb, *.bak and so on.  Basically, you do not want to check-in these types of files.

Go to the TortoiseSVN's Settings dialog and click Edit.

TortoiseSVN's Settings Dialog

This should open a Notepad window displaying a lot of options.  Around line 71, replace the line for # global-ignores with the following:

global-ignores = bin obj cache storage _sgbak *.suo *.pdb *.bak *.user *.db

And make sure to remove the "# " at the beginning.  Save it and it should take effect immediately.  The "cache" and "storage" folders are there because of working with CommunityServer.  With CommunityServer, the cache and storage sub-folders are used for images and attachments for most applications.  We don't want to check in those images, attachments, nor the thumbnails.

Using underscores to prefix the hidden directories
TortoiseSVN stores the versioning information of a directory and files in a hidden svn folder, usually prefixed with a dot ".".  This can reek havok on a few developer applications.  So I check Use "_svn" instead of ".svn" directories on the same dialog shown above.  Visual Studio 6.0's Interdev did not like files starting with a dot ".", and I've seen some funkiness with VS 2003.  VS 2005 may be ok, but it is just a force of habit to use underscores instead of periods for the hidden directories.

Continue to Part 3