Monday, April 25, 2005

Visual Source Safe and Visual Studio 2005?

Looking at this chart, it's unclear to me if I'm going to have to cough up for a VSS license in addition to dropping money on VS2005. Of course, I've never been too clear on VSS licensing in the first place. (And frankly, I'd pay quite a bit not to have to use it, particularly given the number of alternatives that are both superior and free). But I know there are a lot of midsize shops out there that use VSS, and I'll bet they're going to be asking themselves the same questions.

41 comments:

  1. Could you list the source control software that you have used and experience with those ? thanks

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  2. VSS: sucks



    CVS: very good, a bit hard to learn at first. My current favorite.



    Subversion: haven't tried it yet, sounds awesome.



    Source Depot: Internal MSFT product. Very good, although even harder to learn than CVS. Not publically available.



    GotDotNet: Complete pile of garbage. Combines the worst of the web and VSS.



    Generally, I'd recommend either CVS or Subversion. Both are free.

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  3. Source Gear Vault. Free for a single user which works just fine for me. Great product. Eric, where is the VS 2005 version?

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  4. I agree. The only reason I'm holding out any hope for the new version of VSS is because you can use it over port 80 or 443 and they claimed to have fixed the merging/branching/sharing problems. We'll see.

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  5. I've used <a href="http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/index.html">Vault</a> with great success with 10 developers over 4 sites. If you want something "just like VSS" but better, you'd be crazy not to upgrade to Vault. It uses SQL Server, so there is definitely more infrastructure cost.



    Also check out <a href="http://www.codecoop.com/">Code Co-op</a> for disperse teams. The infrastructure cost is nil (uses email!) and there are some really nice features - I particularly like its history view. I've used it with great success as well.



    CVS is fine. Used it a bit.



    PVCS sucks. Every incarnation I've ever used. OK - wait - the DOS version was fine, and I do like their promotion feature.



    Perforce - great feature set, but I just don't like the UI, and it's pricey.



    <a href="http://www.construx.com/">Construx</a> (Steve McConnell's company) uses and recommends <a href="http://www.accurev.com">AccuRev</a>. Wow - it looks awesome - LOVE the streams - but I haven't used it yet. Next time I get to make a purchasing decision for source control, I am going to give it a long look.

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  6. I made links for nothing! Ah well, you can still see the URLs.

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  7. Sorry - allowing links are problematic because of spammers. I've had days where I've had to delete several hundred spam comments.



    But we appreciate the effort. :)

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  8. No problem - but hey, if it weren't for those casinos, nobody would visit my site!

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  9. Craig,



    VSS will be part of the appropriate MSDN subscription or with the Team System version. I believe this was the case in the past also: I remember buying Visual Basic Enterprise Edition years ago and that coming with VSS whereas my Visual C++ Professional didn't.



    The Visual Studio 2005 Professional with MSDN Premium subscription (or whatever it is actually called - something like that) will include VSS once it has been fixed to do so (it didn't in the original descriptions but has been changed as the result of feedback). In other words, this will be the equivalent to the current MSDN Universal subscription.



    See http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=62073 for more info.



    Adrian.

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  10. Thanks Adrian - good info.

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  11. I've been using subversion, http://subversion.tigris.org/, for .Net development since about version 0.2, and my experience has been fantastic. It is much like CVS, but with some major improvements (atomic commits, runs over http/https).



    Free, open source, and fantastic.



    See http://www.subversionary.org/subversionary.cgi/WhyNotVSS for many arguments for using Subversion over VSS.

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  12. "Source Gear Vault. Free for a single user which works just fine for me"



    I am seeing Vault cost $199 without any support or $289 with support?? (Good Price, just not free)

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  13. Any ideas on the best way to integrate VS 2005 with CVS?

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  14. Sorry - no. Never tried it. The TortoiseCVS client is so good I don't think you really need to integrate with VS, though.

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  15. Accurev Sucks. We use it and are constantly battling problems. It's UI is unintuitive and the pretty demo you see is nothing like using it in the real world.

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  16. Ditto on Accurev sucking. It's full of bugs that are difficult to reproduce and constant annoyances get in the way of getting your job done.

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  17. We're using MS Team's source control and it have very poor support for disconected workers. In fact we're lost day of work because of it. Concidering switching to Subversion.

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  18. Is VSS really that bad ive been instructed to set it up for a team of 6 developers with myself in charge of its smooth going. I never used it before so any pointers would be great, thanks brendan

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  19. Well, certainly many people use VSS successfully. But the database does tend to get corrupted from time to time, and the tools are incredibly primitive compared to the competition.



    Basically, it's like being told to use Windows 3.1 in 2006 - you can get by, but the alternatives are far better.

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  20. As far as VSS is concerned... definitely stay away! Any shop now days has (or should have) stream lined releases... to do that, you have to be able to branch code and merge between branches ... Pretty much impossible with VSS 6... I don't know about 2005, but I won't hold my breat...



    Go with either CVS or SVN (subversion) - they are both free and both can do pretty much everything you need.

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  21. We are using AccuRev 4.0 and haven't encountered any problems in the 2+ months we have been using it, but then I heard a lot of bugs were cleaned up with this release. It's been great for us, clean, fast and reliable managing over 7 different product variations, but I'm not one to bash commercial tools every chance I get. Definitely worth every small penny we paid based on evaluations of open source and high end tools both.

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  22. AccuRev is great ! They redesigned the process of parallel development from the ground up. People who are very used to the old school software like VSS ( which doesn't really help you much in parallel development ) will maybe have some trouble getting used to the new concepts, but it's worth it !



    The stream and workspaces concept works much better for parallel development and the promotion model than the tools that were never designed to support such process. Old school tools need complicated branch, merge and labelling processes and scripts to get it 'right'.



    And the negative comments on this blog probably come from programmers who would prefer not to have any SCM at all.



    I evaluated many options about 1 year ago and AccuRev is definitely one of the best.

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  23. I have slowly come to appreciate AccuRev. Branching in every other source control tool pales in comparison to AccuRev's streams. They just make sense. The rest of the features are fine -- nothing particularly good or bad, but the streams are great.

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  24. >> Any ideas on the best way to integrate VS 2005 with CVS?



    Check this link:

    http://www.pushok.com/soft_cvs_proxy.php

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  25. Please some body tell by what means i can get visual source safe 2005.

    IN which products it is included and in which Visual Studios version it is free

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  26. plz tell me from which products visual source safe is available.

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  27. You can obtain VSS on its own or as part of a MSDN Premium subscription.



    Although I have had my share of issues with VSS, I haven't had any of the issues with VSS 2005 with the http and lan assistant. For a small team, I personally think this is the way to go. Managing merging files is just a pain, and generally not worth it in a small team. If you are a Microsoft shop, the integration also just makes it easier. VSS is designed for SMALL groups though, and it doesn't make any claims at being an enterprise source control tool. If you have more than 5 developers working on projects at the same time, get something else.



    I also use Subversion with some of my customers that subcontract me, and the Ankh pluggin for it works pretty well. You definitely want to go through the Subversion manual though, since some operations like moving files and folders have to be done through the svn client rather than being integrated fully through the IDE like they would be for VSS.



    If you can afford them, Team System has very nice version control that integrates well with their issue control system. AccuRev is a similar product that has issue/feature tracking and source control.

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  28. >> some operations like moving files and folders have to be done through the svn client



    FYI: VisualSVN handles file and folders renames and moves in Visual Studio transparently (even Drag&Drop and Copy&Paste).



    http://www.visualsvn.com



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  29. Looks like the AccuRev marketing team was sent out in force to respond to the negative feedback.

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  30. Necesito probar este soft para ver si puedo reparar bases de datos de mi sistema.

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  31. how much that cost of VSS server & also client for windows O.S

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  32. In response to LJohnson's comment on 5/8 -

    Accurev users are passionate about source control and there are 220 some odd users here that don't really think it needs defending. At least when referring to versions after v3.7. No other vc tool comes close to architectural perfection, ease of use and power. This Bud's for you, Accurev. May I buy some options? :-)

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  33. Can someone tell me how much AccuRev costs and a typical proect they might use it for :)

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  34. I use Accurev for my home projects as well as at work. We are a dev team of about 140 and half are now using Accurev, the other half are still on CVS but slowing migrating over. Is there any typical project? We selected Accurev because we had a complex problem to solve and it was the only tool that could solve it (managing several simultaneous release trains, customer hot fixes and patches) without merge pain. I don't know what we paid for it, but I can tell you it was slightly higher than Perforce, but worth the extra cost, and way lower than Serena and ClearCase. My home version was free. Bye bye svn :-)

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  35. Is that true if I have the license for Visual Studio 2005, I dont have to but another license for VSS 2005? Therefore i can just install them if I have the CD?



    cheers

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  36. Accurev sucks donkey balls! I've been using it for six years and still find it completely confusing and unintuitive - aside from things just not working right - particularly when your doing it through the Linux CLI. The GUI is Java-based, so you know its a slow, klunky pig. There are problems that happen, that even our build managers struggle to handle. Avoid at all cost!!!

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  37. I recently became a developer-manager of a group that uses Perforce after having been an Accurev user for the last 6 years, and I have to say that I miss the old days!

    Not that I hate Perforce - it is a good tool. Just that there are lots of little administrative headaches and gotchas that Accurev just takes care of for you. If you have to admin the system yourself, and there are any number of users, consider it.

    While I agree that the Java UI can be slow and klunky (like every Java UI I have ever used), I've worked in enterprise software for a long time and have had to use Accurev on Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX, and I have _never_ seen a problem with any of the CLI on any platform.

    And about being confusing and unintuitive; I have personally trained dozens of developers to use Accurev over the years, and we never had any problems with any of them understanding the concepts of code flow and streams. On the contrary, people usually get it immediately because it IS more intuitive than the old RCS-based systems are. But then again, I guess if your users have sub-average IQs, maybe you should stay away from Accurev ;-P~

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  38. if you are an organization over 100 users like I work for.. You are gonna have some serious deployment issues with accurev. I've been hearing that its gonna get better for years but I dont think they know what regression testing is. They need to clean up their own shop of bugs before they try to fix someone elses. Ask for large referecnes before you buy this tool and make sure they have been using the product for more than 6 months..

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  39. I find it strange that a couple of people are complaining about AccuRev! The product is extremely easy to set up, use, maintain and administer.

    I evaluated AccuRev/PVCS/SVN/Perforce. Once I saw the demo for AccuRev, I knew that if I could reproduce what the demo did then it was a no brainer decision. I rolled out AccuRev(4.6.2) almost 8 months ago bringing over 40+ load lines to an engineering department of almost 100. I had NO deployment problems.

    The online videos that are on their website are a great training guide. I point all of our new developers to them to give them a good overview of AccuRev. If I get a question that I am not 100% sure of the answer, I contact the support staff at AccuRev. They always provide a quick answer.

    The GUI is so easy to use that a couple of our users that were going to use the CLI decided to stick with the GUI. Performance is NOT an issue. Our developers have never once complained about the speed of the GUI..even when used remotely.

    I must admit, the product has practically paid for itself in both developer time saved and my time savings. I wish I would have heard about AccuRev a few years ago because it has made my job as SCM manager less stressful!

    I could go on and on about the benefits of AccuRev when it comes to parallel development/merging/diffs/stream branching/etc, but I suggest you check it out for yourself.

    FYI: I do not work for AccuRev, I only am a very happy user of the product.

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  40. I've used SCCS, RCS, CVS SVN, some ClearCase, and AccuRev. I'm now coming up to speed on GIT, as we have a group that wants to use that for their development. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, depending on how you use them.

    Out of all of them, I tend to like AccuRev the most. At least for me, the stream architecture was very intuitive: I "got" AccuRev by the end of our first technical demo. Perhaps it's because I was more familiar with a wide array of source control tools compared to most. However I did notice that the people we had coming from CVS seemed to have an easier time understanding how AccuRev works when compared to their ClearCase counterparts.

    I would love to know what the specific problems are. We started converting our group on 4.6, and have upgraded to 4.7. The only problems we've seen is when people expect AccuRev to work exactly like whatever source control system they came from, which obviously isn't a reasonable expectation.

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