It's time for Microsoft to make Visual Source Safe go away.
by Jonathan Goodyear
September 30, 2004
tried to come up with a clever analogy to start off this column, but to be honest, I couldn't think of anything appropriate. So I'm just going to come out and say it. Visual Source Safe is a terrible product. I know it, you know it, and Microsoft knows it. Everybody knows it. Heck, it's so bad that Microsoft doesn't even use it for its own internal development. Why? Because VSS couldn't handle it (from a repository size or a user base size perspective).
So why has Microsoft kept it around for so long? After all, at the PDC in San Diego this year, Microsoft announced a fabulous new array of software design and collaboration applications, collectively referred to as Visual Studio 2005 Team System (formerly code named Whitehorse). Part of that system is a source code version control repository that has been built from the ground up around SQL Server (as it should be). Closely integrated with the source code repository system is a work item tracking application that is able to keep track of bugs, feature requests, risks, and other related project artifacts.
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Jonathan Goodyear is the president of ASPSoft, Inc., an Internet consulting firm based in Orlando, FL. He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and is the author of 'Debugging ASP.NET' (New Riders). He is also a contributing editor for Visual Studio Magazine and asp.netPRO Magazine, and speaks frequently at major technology conferences such as VSLive and ASP.NET Connections. Reach him at through his angryCoder eZine.
tried to come up with a clever analogy to start off this column, but to be honest, I couldn't think of anything appropriate. So I'm just going to come out and say it. Visual Source Safe is a terrible product. I know it, you know it, and Microsoft knows it. Everybody knows it. Heck, it's so bad that Microsoft doesn't even use it for its own internal development. Why? Because VSS couldn't handle it (from a repository size or a user base size perspective).
