Chapter 15 -- Source Code Control

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Chapter 15

Managing source code in a team environment is a difficult job; doing so when many developers are involved and no source code tool is employed is almost impossible . Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is a tool that ships with the Enterprise edition of Microsoft Visual Basic, but there's some speculation that the tool was meant to remain an internal application and not be released to the general public. (By the way, Microsoft didn't create Visual SourceSafe; the company purchased it.) Although Help text exists for Visual SourceSafe, the program's general workings and the process of setting up Visual SourceSafe in a production environment are not that well documented. In addition, Visual SourceSafe doesn't have the polish of most Microsoft applicationsit contains many functional and physical characteristics that fall far beneath the standards of Microsoft Windows applications. For instance, one of Visual SourceSafe's three components (Visual SourceSafe Administrator) doesn't even have a File menu! Also, many of the program's menu items weren't placed on the menus that make the most sense.

The complexity of implementing Visual SourceSafe in a development environment, coupled with its nonstandard appearance and less-than -adequate documentation, prevent many people from successfully implementing and using Visual SourceSafe. Many are discouraged from even trying. I've known a number of highly technical people who were unable to get Visual SourceSafe up and runningone was an MCSE!

Nonetheless, Visual SourceSafe works , and if you take the time to implement it in your team environment, you'll be glad you did. Rather than offering directives that will help you create better code, my goal in this chapter is teaching you how to use a tool that will drastically reduce the amount of resources needed to manage a large product and a team of developers, a tool that will easily handle situations almost impossible to deal with without some sort of integrated solution.