TortoiseSVN has many features. Most of the time, you won't need all the features it has but only a few, depending on the projects you work on. But there are some features which you would use if you only knew they were there.

The specifications for integrating Subversion development with your issue tracking system was cooperatively created and developed by the TortoiseSVN and Subclipse teams. Both products support these features, and since the first introduction of the specification many other tools added support for them.

While the main focus of TortoiseSVN lies on usability, sometimes I like to add something which doesn't really add a value but just looks nice.

Last week I wanted to implement just that: something that looks nice but doesn't disturb the user. The Windows explorer shows a slightly visible image on the bottom right depending on what files are in the folder it currently shows. The image is barely visible like a watermark. I wanted to show such a watermark image in our main dialogs file list.

If you're working with big projects, you might encounter some performance problems when using TortoiseSVN. Here are some tips to optimize the settings:

• Don't put your working copies on a network share but keep them on your local harddrive.
  There are several problems with working copies on network shares. First, a network share is much slower than your local harddrive. Which means whenever TortoiseSVN has to fetch the status of your working copy (e.g. for a commit, update, or simply to show the overlay icons) it will take a lot longer and use a lot of bandwidth.