Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe
Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe.
This is pretty funny. I have never really liked VSS myself. There is always something better out there. Some people are afraid of the cost, but with SVN the cost is not a problem. But SVN in general is quite foreign to a Windows developer, so that’s why some people go with Source Vault. I have used it a bit and I really like it. There is some cost to it but not too much.
But to answer the questions – “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?” – I guess, I would make sure that there is only one person in charge of the merging. Use a lot of branching, stick with check in/out model, check your database for integrity from time to time, and no users spread around the world hitting the same database.
And of course – backup, backup and backup.
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I would also add that not doing too frequent integrations with a CI server would be a good practice, from past experience, with a team too embedded to switch, CruiseControl completely scrambled the source repository.
I think is almost bizarre that “SVN in general is quite foreign to a Windows developer”. I started out my professional career in software projects that used VSS. It has been 2-3 years since I switched to subversion, and man don’t want to look at VSS ever again. Only one person being able to make edits to a file at a time is so crippling.