This will now be maintaned in the .NET Source Control discussion forum.

I have been a long term Visual Source Safe fan, preferring a visual GUI interface to get a good feel of the status of pending check-ins.  However, unless you spend money and buy SourceOffSite you can't practically do telecommuniting over slow connections with SourceSafe.  CVS or Subversion (which are both free) solve this.  Subversion holds great promise in the long term but at this stage is a bit immature and has a lot of catch up to do to get close to CVS functionality.  A CVS server can be hosted on Unix/Linux or WinNT using CVSNT .

WinCVS has been the most popular CVS GUI for Windows but I found configuration very confusing and in some cases the behaviour was unexpected and therefor I felt dangerous.  I'm not the only one who has been put off CVS by WinCVS.  This year I discovered TortoiseCVS that integrates CVS version control intoWindows Explorer.  It's much more intuitive and also freeware.  To use it productively you'll probably also need Putty to perform Secure Shell logins into Unix (depends on how you authenticate to the CVS server).  You'll probably need to learn about how to setup PAgent (part of the Putty kit) as TortoiseCVS has borrowed the Putty code that integrates with PAgent.  BTW, there's also a TortoiseSVN under development for use with Subversion but it also has lots of catch up to do.

Jalindi Igloo is a free SCC compliant plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio (and other compliant IDEs) to support CVS.  We found it had quite a few limitations ... some scary .. and no source code available to fix them.  Although I've not yet used it, for $US19 you can get CVS SCC Proxy that claims it will fix most of the problems associated with Igloo.