John Sheehan : Blog - Latest Comments in Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Catherine — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:04:19 -0000

I think SourceSafe is good if you work in a LAN. But the remote-access performance is terribke.

Thanks.

Catherine Sea
http://www.scmsoftwareconfi...

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Kevin Gao — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:58:36 -0000

If all your developers work in the same building and you do not need advanced project branch/merge feature, SourceSafe should be fine for you.

I am writing a VSS tutorial at:
http://www.kevingao.net/sou...

If you like VSS, you can take a look. :)

Thanks.

Kevin Gao, MCSD, MCDBA

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Daniel — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:29:54 -0000

We are finally migrating from VSS to SVN and i'm looking forward to it. My only worry is that VSS will manage to get corrupted once again before the migration... :)

Honestly VSS might maybe have in some way been a almost ok tool back in the days (not to me) but to me i don't know how many times we've been working our asses of to uncorrupt the database, fix incorrect permissions and so forth...

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Josh Stodola — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:09:28 -0000

I don't mind it. We use it at work and it's not that bad. Being able to compare history versions right in Visual Studio is pretty sweet. Sometimes I am just like "Hmm, lets see who wrote this line of code". It was painful to get it setup, but now it's cake.

I haven't used anything else extensively, so my opinion is somewhat biased. Its an opinion nonetheless.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

owen — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:25:30 -0000

I used VSS when i first got into development, didn't mind it, then I tried to push everyone into continuous integration only to find that because of various bugs in VSS the repository would become frequently corruped and needed rebuilding/scanning. So we switched to SVN and not one of us looked back. It's fine, but really not great. Especially when you look at the competition.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Rob Prouse — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:41:47 -0000

I am using TFS at work with a small team and a very large project. For the most part it works very well, but every so often we hit one of those boundary conditions (usually around branching/merging or backing out changes) and it can get very difficult to get it to do what you want. It is a good product, but I would recommend waiting for the next version before migrating.

We were using VSS for this project before and it was nothing but painful. Our project is so large that we had regular corruption of the repository, we couldn't branch, if different developers had different versions of VSS installed it caused problems with encodings. It was like night and day when we switched to TFS despite the problems.

I use SVN at home with TortoiseSVN and the VisualSVN plugin for Visual Studio. It just works and I never have any problems with it.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Poul R. Hansen — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 02:07:54 -0000

Actually I wouldn't touch SVN nor VSS if I could avoid it, TFS is simply way to nice, the only thing missing from TFS is the ability to "mirror folders", not branch them, but an actually mirror where the mirror is as much the real thing as the original, and changes in one of the mirrors will also change the original.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Noah — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 14:54:03 -0000

Well I like VSS, but I'm a lone developer so I guess I don't use all its features -- I just use it so I can undo my screwups. It integrates very well with VS.NET and though I have my complaints about how it works on my laptop when I'm on the road (can take 30 minutes to realize it can't find the VSS server and ask if I want to use my local copies) for my needs it works real well.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Julian Birch — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 05:46:39 -0000

Moving source control, or for that implementing source control in the first place, is extremely painfully. Especially if you have more than ten people to co-ordinate. You also have to move everyone across to a different mindset. It's not an easy process.

Of course, a large amount of this could be dealt with by two tools. 1) A "don't make me think" migration tool, which had sensible defaults and actually rebound client projects to the new source control system. 2) A plug-in integration into Visual Studio. Developers are extremely conservative at times...

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

TweeZz — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:46:41 -0000

>> Is there anyone out there that uses VSS and likes it?
Yes there is. We are using VSS at work. I don't really have anything wrong to say about it.
But then again, I never really used other source control system intensively.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Slace — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:59:14 -0000

>> Is there anyone out there that uses VSS and likes it?

No... no there isn't

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

John Sheehan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:39:45 -0000

Oh, I'm not leaving. The company is great and we will eventually switch to SVN. I'm just looking for things that make VSS more tolerable.

Re: Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe

Rich C — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:37:39 -0000

1 word: leave.

I wouldn't go back to VSS after subversion. There are plenty of other opportunities at open-minded companies to suffer with using substandard tools.