SVN in ASP.NET with Ankh basics for day-to-day usage

My team now has an SVN + Ankh setup in ASP.NET with trunk, branches, and tags. We switch branches and work on code, but many times there will be inexplicable conflicts in files after simple changes. Why is this? I suspect we simply don't understand enough of how this works. Are there any do's and don'ts, or how should we be approaching our daily changes and commits, without causing conflicts? 开发者_如何学运维Is there a basic pecking order of operations to perform to achieve SVN zen? Are we updating before committing or something? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Always update before commit. If you really work with branches don't use switch or only if you really undstand the switch command and how it works otherwise checkout a branch into a fresh working copy in other words create a new one.

Always branch, merge on the solution element, make sure you're fully up to date before merging (ankhsvn will warn about this), also make sure you have no modified files before merging.

Read up on svnbook for when to use normal merging and when to use reintegrate.

Finally, if a conflict does occur, make sure you have a good 3way merge tool to solve the conflict. AnkhSVN recognizes a lot of them automatically, but I really like source gear diffmerge