So Much For The Cloud ...

I've talked before how we like to have our version control and bug tracking in the "cloud". This allows us to keep synchronized from home, work, or when Jamie is writing his book in Vancouver.

The only downside is when the cloud is unavailable, like it has been for the last two days. The neighbours in unit 115 had their phone turned on, and the installer managed to turn off our phone while working on the switch panel. I took a look at it, but nothing was obvious, and I didn't want to affect any other tenants in our building. Our service provider said a technician would be by in two days. Thankfully our website and email aren't hosted from our office.

However, it does make our development process difficult. Three things become problematic:

1. Even though we're developing a desktop application, most of the documentation for APIs we are using are online, making it difficult to figure out how to use the APIs correctly.
2. I can't open or update Trac tickets.
3. Can't check in code.

The last point is the most critical. I've worked on 3 or 4 issues in the last two days, and my workspace is now littered with changed files relating to those issues. Because I can't do atomic commits, I've now intermingled the fixes for those four issues together, losing the audit trail for those changes.

The DVCS crowd would rightfully point out that if we were running Git, this wouldn't be an issue. I could have checked in changes to my local repository and then merged them to the master repository on the cloud. Score one for Git. However, up until recently, Git support on Windows is regarded as poor, and again until recently, there was no Visual Studio addin for Git. It may be possible to do what I want with some combination of SVK+SVN, but it seemed pretty complicated.

So, the cloud works great when it works. Then it doesn't. Any one out there have techniques to work around these types of issues? Are Visual Studio folks using the new Git tools? Or working offline?