We are planning on moving for MS Source Safe (ouch) to SVN. We are working mostly in a Microsoft environment (windows, Visual Studio, .NET) and we have developers in multiple sites. I heard about VisualSVN and integration with visual studio. On the other hand I can get someone to host SVN for me and use TortoiseSVN. Any recommendations? Any pitfalls I should avoid?
Hosting subversion is fantastically simple. At the risk of being labeled a brown nose (is there a badge for that?) Jeff Atwood did put up an article on installing subersion
So really you could save yourself some money by running your own subversion server and you'll never have to worry about what happens to your code if your hosting company goes belly up.
I would start with tortoise because it is free and is really easy to use. If you find you really need integration with VS then by all means try out visual svn. In my experience source control <-> editor integration is most useful for automatically opening files when you edit them. Subversion doesn't require you to open files so that big advantage is gone.