I have a group of people who work on a project from their homes.
Can anyone suggest me ways in which we can have a single repository of the code on the server and all the guys editing that code and testing/debugging it on their local machines?
We are using .NET platform and using Visual Studio 2010 as the IDE. I was rather keen on knowing if there could be a single repository for the code and local editing of it?
You need to research Source Control
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Revision Control
Here's a Visual Guide to Source Control
Consider using Git for source control and getting yourself an on-line account with GitHub.
GitHub can act as a central location where your team can pull and push code to and is a lot less hassle than maintaining your own source control server.
We use the excellent GUI tool Git Extentions to make working with Git easy on Windows.
Download and install Visual SVN Server. One of you should host this and it should be accessible to the outside world. If you're worried about firewalls, I suggest installing Hamachi (Visual SVN server is free for the non-enterprise edition, and the 10-seat non-commercial Hamachi is free also).
VisualSVN also do a plug-in for Visual Studio which integrates Tortoise SVN directly. It's pretty cheap too, and works fantastically. Note, the plug-in is NOT essential to work with VisualSVN, it just makes life a little easier when working with Visual Studio solutions. I managed very well without it for quite some time, but when I did buy it, I never looked back.
Well, there are several things I can advise you.
At first, as mentioned, you should use a Source Control.
It might be SVN
or GIT
or TFS (it's not free and very expensive!)
or SourceSafe
At second, you guys need some tracking tool, such as JIRA or TFS. It will allow you to track all issues you assign to coworkers.
At third, you need some kind of continious integration stuff, such as TeamCity or CruiseControl.
As you can see, there are a lot of problems to resolve. What I can advise you is to use some team-work web-platforms such as Assembla that can provide you all things I mentioned.
For distributed source/version control, you could do worse than Perforce. You can use it for free, but you're limited to 2 users and 5 client workspaces. If you're project is open-source, you can apply for a free license.
Anything else you need to pay for. By the standards of configuration management software, its not hideously expensive...something like $750/seat in small quantities.
The nice thing about it is that it's designed to work across wide area networks.
It sounds like your looking for a source control solution. Git or Mercurial are probably your best options.
See Git Extensions for the Git plugin for Visual Studio.
See VisualHg for the Mercurial plugin for Visual Studio (requires TortoiseHg).