title: Understanding branch use with Visual Studio 2010, AnkhSVN, and SVN 1.7.4
body: <p>I am a complete newb to Subversion, but am trying to get past the frightening shadow of SourceSafe. So I'm learning, trying to teach myself what's what, and I've come across some roadblocks I don't quite understand yet. </p>
  
  <p>SVN 1.7.3 is up and running on a local Linux box. AnkhSVN is installed within my VS 2010 setup. VS/AnkhSVN can talk to my repository. So I started experimenting with some very simple Console projects to get started. I created the trunk, branches, and tags directories as suggested in the guidance I've found so far. </p>
  
  <p>I created a new Console solution, and allowed Ankh to create that project in my repository under the recommended "trunk" folder. After adding nothing more than a "Hello, World" line to Program.cs, I commit the changes to trunk. That works...so far, so good...</p>
  
  <p>I'm now wanting to pretend I'm working on a private branch, so I select Subversion->Branch Project... from "trunk" and the "Head/Latest" version, checking "Switch to Branch after creation." That seems to go well.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Problem 1.</strong></p>
  
  <p>Now here's where things get dicey. I decide to add a single source file to the project in my private branch, adding the file, but I cannot get the file to move from my private branch to trunk. Merging/reintegrate doesn't work. Update doesn't work. Switch doesn't work. Now, after trying a switch from the branch to the trunk, VS tells me my project file is corrupt and can't be loaded. </p>
  
  <p>Obviously, I've done something terribly wrong, but I don't know what. It appears I just need to get a trunk working copy, then do a merge, but how do I do that in my VS project folder setup? </p>
  
  <p><strong>Problem 2</strong></p>
  
  <p>My next problem, or question, which may be part of Problem 1, is understanding how Subversion-managed projects should be structured on the Visual Studio side. Its much clearer to me on the Unix side that you can pull a project into a local folder, but its not at all clear how the typical directory structure of a VS project is supposed to be affected by Subversion. Should the trunk and branches folders be duplicated on the local Visual Studio box as well? If I "switch" from trunk to a private branch (or vice-versa), is the intent that the corresponding files should be going into the same set of VS folders, or should there be a corresponding set for the branches and for the trunk?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Problem 3</strong>
  This is more of a newbie SVN question, but when SVN tells me there are conflicts, I don't yet understand how to resolve them. Does the ankhSVN plug-in have special tools to resolve conflicts, or do I need to fix them on the host server with the full svn tool? If so, what's is the "most typical" kind of conflict to resolve? </p>