Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe
Is there anyone out there that uses VSS and likes it?? I recently switched over all my local projects from Vault to Subversion, but it seems like everywhere I go to work VSS is the defacto source control solution, even though it seems to be universally loathed. So I’m wondering if I’m missing something. Let’s assume you’re in a situation where it would impractical or impossible to quickly switch to something better, what do you do to make using VSS more tolerable?
Comments
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.
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.
>> Is there anyone out there that uses VSS and likes it?
No… no there isn’t
>> 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
[...] Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe. [...]
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.
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.
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…
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