Administering the Visual SourceSafe Database

Before you can use Visual SourceSafe, you need to

• Create the SourceSafe database.

• Create users and assign privileges to them.

You can do these operations via the Visual SourceSafe Administration tool:

1. Start the tool from Start | Visual SourceSafe | Visual SourceSafe Administration.

2. To create a new database, start the wizard by selecting File | New Database from the main menu.

3. Set the path of the VSS database (i.e., D:\VSS).

   Note 

   You should set the location of the VSS database on the local drive (to avoid performance problems). If you want to point to some network drive, you should probably use that file server as your VSS server.

4. Set the name of your VSS database connection (i.e., My VSS).

5. Verify that Team Version Control Model is set to Lock-Modify-Unlock Model.

Note 

The Copy-Modify-Merge model is a new unorthodox source control model that allows multiple users to make modification on the same file at the same time. Unfortunately, the price to pay for such freedom is the potential for conflicting changes to files. Unless you are certain that you want to work in this model and you know how to resolve conflicts and merge changes, I recommend you use the standard Lock-Modify-Unlock model.

When you install Visual SourceSafe, you create just two users: Admin and Guest. The Admin user has all privileges in the database and can also create other users. The Guest user should be immediately limited to read-only access to source code files. Both users are created with their passwords set to an empty string (that is, blank). Since this state constitutes a threat to your source code, your first step should be to set their passwords using User | Change Password.

When you are done, create a user for yourself (User | Add User) with the appropriate permissions. Note that some versions of Visual SourceSafe create a user for the person that has created VSS database automatically.

Tip 

If your Visual SourceSafe username and password match your operating system username and password, you will not have to type them each time you open Visual SourceSafe on the local system. Visual SourceSafe can he configured to use them automatically.

With Visual SourceSafe, you can assign more refined permission levels, such as Add, Rename, Delete, Check In, Check Out, Destroy, and Read. To activate this wide-ranging control, click Tools | Options | Project Rights and check the Enable Project Security option. It is not a bad idea to do that. It is especially useful to prevent your users from permanently deleting source code files (Destroy).