This article gives an overview of Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft’s version control technology, and provides a look at where this technology is headed in the future.
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe Roadmap
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have “to use that piece of crap at work, an it is a very rigid/date tool. In the last VS versions, they move from version 6.0, 6.0a, 6.0b, and guess, 6.0c … Try to add more tha 200 files ( I think that was the limit or was 255) … you will receive a lovely message saying something like “Adding more than 200 files in Windows is unsafe, are you sure to continue?”
If you try to add a whole directory instead of creating a “project” and adding files one-by-one you need to guess the secret procedure (if someone asks, I might say it
)
File Dialogs are OLD, rigid versions intented for files in 8.3 format, and going no deeper than C:HERE. If path is longer neither the tree control nor the path textbox have enough space.
File comparing tool is acceptable, but far from other tools I’ve tried … File managing /querying, functions etc are a real pain in the ###.
Tool was added for the original VS 6, and it has been changed apporximately nothing. It doesn’ even match the new VS.NET style.
I’m glad to hear they are going to work on it, but I hope that it means dropping the old client and making something usable, and not only looking for a way to sell more SQL 2005 Licenses for the server side only.
VS.NET has some commands built in to check in/out files directly from it, but I have to say that support is most of the times useless/unreliable/problematic/{put any equivalent adjective here}.
I have to admin that peice of crap for a job! So I’d hope that the answer to “Where is Visual Sourcesafe going?” is “Straight into the bin”.
Maybe Microsoft could start by completely re-writing the awful client interface. Most of the time required to do anything with VSS is simply remembering how to do it. Ever tried to create a (functional) VSS database from scratch? It’s easier to do it by hand, running the creation tool and two upgrade tools yourself (I’m not kidding. You create a V4 database, upgrade it to V5 and then upgrade that to V6) I keep a ZIP of an empty database around that I can unzip and rename to create new databases these days. Performance sucks, even if you do run analyze on a weekly basis. Oh good lord…the dialogs. They’re a star feature in the Interface Hall of Shame! The only, tiny, saving grace for VSS is that the CLI tools are available so you can script VSS database manipulation should you need to.
If you’re looking for a lightweight SCM I’d suggest you try Subversion. It’s fairly easy to setup and integrates just as well, if not better, than VSS with E.g. Eclipse or VS.Net and there are standalone clients available which are much better than VSS, too.
(Here ends my “Day job” rant)
It’s an open secret that Microsoft’s engineers don’t use VSS. No-one will eat this particular dog food because it’s better than VSS continues to be a bad product than that engineers working on real projects like Office or SQL Server should sacrifice their productivity. This sort of thing is one of Microsoft’s strengths – leave the dying on the battlefield and win the day.
if they do a redesign from the ground up, and throw in a billion of development money, it will end up being something decent.
If it is a cumulative build, with any luck it may be ready for the nineties by 2006.
A dictionary doesn’t contain enough insults and profanities to do this abomination justice.
“Do more with less” is actually correct if “less” is to mean, “do not use Visual SourceSafe 6”.
Day job rants may not be constructive, but they sure feel good!
To the garbage bin and then being replaced with
Subversion I´d say….
Microsoft does not even eat their own dog food in this case!
Please kill that hunk of crap. Actually, I thought it was already dead, since it hasn’t been touched by anyone with a functioning brain since VisualStudio 6 was released.
I mean, really, in the face of things like Subversion and Perforce, or even CVS, why would _anyone_ with a clue choose to use VSS? The only reasons I’ve ever heard for using it have been “management told us to”.
– chrish
It is the only version control system, that works with MS Visual Foxpro. And we use Foxpro because we have ever used it.
Not quite as badly as people here are claiming. It underperforms in every category, but (for example) it’s not that difficult to get a working database.
It really is a terrible tool, though. I don’t know if I could think of one Microsoft did worse.
We have been using VSS for quite some time, but since we switched to P4 (Perforce) things imrpoved a lot. No longer strange .vsscp files lying around your project, and not having way to submit a group of files in one transaction now would seem pain for us (in P4 it’s called changelist).
The limitation of 255 is not correct though, it’s about 2000 files
(Actually it’s correct if you try to add them from a OpenFile box, but if you add them by groups, then the limit is about 2000 (VSS5 or VSS6)). We had the bad luck of putting a lot of audio files in a single directory, and then we had to roll that back, and reorganize everything by splitting the things by subdirectories.
VSS also keeps the files on the server in some strange way – everything seems to be obsfucated. If you look at P4 database it directly stores the changes for each file in a directory, rather than some obscure filenames. This way you can even fix some things on the fly. And P4 seems to not be slowned down by the fact that it stores the names that way. Might be the fact that VSS stores the files this way, comes from some old 8.3 filename limitation.