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Good advice. Mod parent up. From a technology perspective, a Version Control System, Test Driven Development, and Continuous Integration can go a long way towards improving quality. If the OP is in a MSFT shop, then you are most probably stuck with VSS or TFS. VSS is file based so it is not very good for distributed development. You will need to enhance VSS with SoS if you have remote developers. TFS doesn't have that problem and also has support for TDD's unit testing. If the OP is willing to use OSS, then there are plenty of good options available. There is plenty of good advice here as to OSS VCS. There are various unit testing frameworks for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, C++, you name it. Also, check out Cruise Control for Continuous Integration.

Technology alone cannot solve quality issues, however. Changes in methodology, process, and even corporate culture may also be needed. Take a look at my site for more advice on that.

it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke. Everything is a marketing doc and it turns out that it couldn't do what my buddy wanted it to do. He asked them about it and they said it could. BTW, I was there for all 8 hours.

Ahhh, yeah. SourceSafe is pretty crappy. It's really only appropriate for very small teams with very simple needs. Unfortunately, alot of not-too-savvy shops use it because it ships with the rest of the tool stack, and for these kinds of groups, it generally works 'good enough', so they never try anything different. These also tend to be, in my experience, the sorts of groups who dont do alot of process and release management. Very ad-hoc shops, in other words.

Specifically:

it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke.

I'm not aware that it has any integration capabilities with anything other than the dev environments made by MS. You've basically got the API where other things can hook into it, IVSS and MSSCCI. The former is all com stuff, so easy to consume, though the documentation is fairly crappy. The latter is (I believe) the api used to make a new provider, which I think you need to setup as a VSIP, which is free if you dont want dedicated tech support.

But other than that, I dont think there's much in the way of 'integration' with other MS products. There's even (IIRC) some real caveats to hooking it into your AD to use network logins.

Still sounds to me like the guy didnt do his research, but hey, I wasnt there. I think most of us who have been around in the MS world for a while know that VSS is pretty crappy, and doesnt do much, and what it does, it doesnt do well, so would be looking for an alternate solution.

If you want to maintain the API and semantics of VSS, you can use SourceGear Vault, which maintains the api and the way VSS works, but uses a real database on the backend, and is much more reliable and contains many integration points.

Oh, for some reason, those guys would not tell me what software configuration management(SCM) package they are using at Microsoft. The way they laughed on the phone at my question lead me to believe it was not something they tell people and it's not a Microsoft product.

It's all second or third hand, but my understanding is that many years ago, MS bought source rights to a high-performance commercial product (something like Perforce) and have been modifying it to their own needs internally for many years. Not too surprising I guess, they have fairly unique needs. The combination of the size and monolithic-nature of their windows systems, combined with the way they do their development.

Anyways, I've found that people who make their living on Microsoft are Microsoft to the bone. Hardly worth attempting to tell them about something new/interesting in OSS because if it ain't MS, it doesn't exist. They'll be happy to wait 5-10 years to get it from Microsoft.

Well, always nice to slip in an insulting generality to a population that uses a different toolset than you do, but hey, thats what /. is for, right?

I've got a better (and probably more accurate) generality for you to arbitrarily divide up the population with. It's still pretty silly, but is a much more useful theoretical basis to model populations with.

1. Those who arent technology professionals, and use only what they know, and cant even be bothered to learn about the industry as a whole, and let vendors/consultants/etc be their technology professionals so they dont have to.

2. Those who develop the internal skills and staff to be technology professionals, in at least one subset, without relying on external consultants or vendors.

Now there's nothing inherently wro

Are you in contact with our tech support folks? If you're having trouble with our product in any way, we definitely want to help.

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewforum.php?f=5

Regarding VSS, the *ONLY* benefit over other solutions is Visual Studio integration, other SCC solutions give you this ability as well, unfortunately, iirc VS only supports one type of SCC to be active in the install at a time... I would suggest looking into Subversion + AnkhSVN, or Vault .. it's a pain to setup a repository in windows, but it works pretty well.. :) using cvsnt + tortoisecvs for most of my home stuff..

Uhh.. how about SourceGear?

You know.. the guys who wrote Source Offsite to let people access SourceSafe remotely...

Their product, Vault (http://sourcegear.com/vault/index.html), uses Mono when it runs on Linux and .NET when it runs on Windows.

Any other things you'd like me to point you to? Like the "Login" button?

SourceGear Vault. The best source repository software I've used.

I used a combination of USB 2.0 and Firewire external drives. Maxtor 250Gb were around $230.00 retail (CompUSA purchase); Maxtor 200Gb were around $190.00 retail. The last few I put together were Belkin external USB 2.0 conversion cases with 160Gb drives I had taken from a failed RAID array.

I've got ten drives right now, performance is phenomenal, and I no longer have to worry about my son destroying the CDs or DVDs he plays with. Using Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% I'm able to emulate the common CD protections and mount images; using scripts I can simplify the task for my son.

I have one drive dedicated as my Vault storage. It's where I keep local repositories of open source code that interests me.

The biggest problem I've run into is merging the drives seamlessly under Windows. Under Linux it's no problem. Symbolic links massed in one central directory takes care of the problem; you can schedule the script to run using cron and create the links so it is always up to date.

Under Windows it is a bit more of a pain in the ass since shortcuts aren't "true" files. A nifty piece of software I found called Winbolic Link lets me make links that behave more like symbolic links do. The only downside is I've yet to find a way to script Winbolic Link but I'm probably going to switch my fileserver over to Linux soon *anyway*.

For what it's worth I have over twenty years of games, both CD and floppy (I have Might & Magic on bootable 5.25", if you can find the drive). "Finding" a game is a disaster for me. Thankfully imaging does exist, and I can still play the original Pool of Radiance when I want.

Not used it, but it looks pretty good if you're in the Windows world - like a better version of VSS. And it's free for a single user here. Also, the guy that runs the company - Eric Sink - is quite well know in blogging circles. Some of his columns about starting a company are linked to from /.

All of these are CVS for Windows tools. CVS is a great revision control system.

We use SourceGear vault at work and it works great. It integrates well with Visual Studio and the provided client is easy to use as well. It does cost money, but it was pretty reasonable compared to the alternatives we looked at ($200 per user), including CVS since it took so long to get setup, there would be a learning curve for everyone, and the extra time it takes for everyone to use it would more than offset the cost.

We tried perforce as well, but it didn't even compare to SourceGear, and we had a lot of problems getting it to work well with Visual Studio .NET, for web-based projects especially.

The best source control system I ever used was in VisualAge for Java from IBM. I used it on a big Java project at one of my clients. It was integrated with the IDE and tracked changes to individual methods in the classes you were working on. Every time you saved, it would store that version in your local repository. I liked being able to version and name each class, package, and project. You can call them anything you want, but if you put numbers at the end, it will automatically increment them the next time (i.e. naming something "SSTP 1.4.1" will let you automatically version it to be "SSTP 1.4.2" without having to type anything. The local repository was in one big file that held all your changes until you version something to the server. You could even copy that file and take it somewhere else and keep all your changes. I was thinking of writing something similar in C#, anyone else interested?

I do.

Source Gear.

Don't be too hasty in dismissing this guy...

SourceGear, Ximian Partner on Mono Project to Deliver .NET Client Applications Across Windows, Linux and Unix Platforms

I don't know if Microsoft ever did anything for these platforms, but there is a third-party company, called Sourcegear that makes a solution for Unix based platforms.

I have always preferred Rational ClearCase over VSS and have also used a new product from SourceGear called SourceGear Vault which claims to be a compelling replacement for VSS. Well, guess what? They're right. Not only is it a better SCC, but it also has tight integration with both VS *AND* the classic remote access products from SourgeGear (ie. SourceOffSite) for your offsite development staff. Both are recommended, but the Rational tools are a bit pricey for smaller shops. I believe that a 5-node version of SourceGear Vault is priced around $599 (if you already owen SQL Server), or $999 (which includes a SQL Server license). Take a look at SourceGear Vault

Sure you might have some resistance to anything that isn't VSS, I was just pointing out some alternatives. I was replying to a misinformed post that said VSS was the only option.

Also, there is Vault which looks very promising. It uses SQL Server as it's repository, and SOAP as the transport and is written in .NET.

This is getting more offtopic but:
you should check out SOS if you're still using VSS.

We overcome sluggish performance of VSS over VPN/CIFS with SourceOffSite, a third-party client-server pair where a remote client sends requests via TCP/IP to the server that in turn comes as a client to the on-site VSS server. Unbelievably, it works orders of magnitude faster.

The CVS/Un*x analogy to this would be the difference between accessing to the repository on an NFS volume over S/WAN and the CVS client-server interaction. Makes me wonder over the comparison of CIFS/ActiveDirectory vs NFS on remote Internet connections.

For those of you sentenced to using VSS, there is a much speedier front end to it, called SourceOffSite. Makes even modem access feel fast - it makes VSS into true client-server.

Check it out here.

If the term 'Enlightenment' were trademarked, other Linux people wouldn't be able to use the term 'Enlightenment', although they would be able to distribute the window manager.

Trademark exists to protect consumers from confusion. If I'm distributing a genuine copy of Enlightenment, there isn't anything confusing me about calling it Enlightenment. I can certainly use the term "Microsoft Windows" to describe the system I'm using right now, and if I sell my computer, I can say "Comes with a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows" (assuming it actually does). You can use a trademark all you want to describe the product or service the trademark applies to. If I buy a new copy of Windows and don't open it, I can print up advertisements that I'm selling a copy of Microsoft Windows. As long as there is no possibility for confusion between the product or service the trademark applies to and something unrelated, everything is fine.

This situation has actually come up. SourceGear has trademarks on AbiWord and related Abi prefixed products. SourceGear makes the trademarks available under certain terms. If I want to fork AbiWord and not agree to those terms, I have to give it a new name. If I didn't change the name, there might be confusion between my AbiWord and SourceGear's AbiWord. I can describe it as "Based on AbiWord," so long as I'm careful to not imply that my product is AbiWord (that is a grey area, however).

This is Slashdot. We are self-professed "Nerds". One of my definitions of a nerd is someone who thinks that technology is interesting. Normal people aren't like that. They desperately want technology to be boring.

I wrote this article a few months ago, but it might be of interest to the readers of this thread. Enjoy!

-- Eric W. Sink

Use Source Offsite. They have a linux client, which I haven't used, but their Windows client kicks ass. Even on a local network it is faster than VSS. They have command line clients too, which are great for scripting.

Still though, it ain't cheap, and is no substitute for CVS.
--

You could always go to www.sourcegear.com and take a look. If it's too hard to figure out after just one visit, we really need to fix the website.

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More about SourceOffSite here.

Some chapters of Karl Fogel's book about CVS, (the Concurrent Version System, the source code control system used by many a free software project) are available under the GPL.