Understanding Visual SourceSafe

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What is Visual SourceSafe? This is a question that's difficult to answer. Visual SourceSafe is a tool comprising the following three components :

• An administrator program. Used to manage tasks such as setting up source code control and creating user accounts.
• A user's program. Visual SourceSafe Explorer allows each developer to manage project files.
• An add-in to Visual Basic. Provides an integrated solution for managing Visual Basic project files under source code control.

Visual SourceSafe allows you to

• Manage all sorts of source files, including text, graphics, resources, and sounds
• Control who has access to source code files
• Know who is working on what source code files
• Make sure only one person at a time can modify a source file
• Revert to previous versions of source files or merge current changes with earlier revisions
• Maintain a current version as well as revisions in a centralized location

As I've said, more than one competent system administrator has given up on using Visual SourceSafe to manage team development, and this is not because of a lack of skill on the administrator's part or because Visual SourceSafe doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Rather, Visual SourceSafe is unnecessarily difficult to set up with the little documentation provided in Help. Before you can begin setting up source code control, you need to understand the basic principles involved.

First, when a project is under source code control, no developer makes changes directly to the master copy of the project. Instead, each developer works with his or her own copy of the source code files ”a developer checks out files when ready to change them, much as you check out a library book. When a developer is finished making modifications, he or she checks in the file or files. Throughout the entire process, a complete copy of the project is kept in the developer's working folder. (I'll explain working folders later in this chapter.) Although you have access (read permissions) to all files in the project, you can alter only those files that you have checked out. While you have a file checked out, no other user is allowed to check it out (with the exception of the master project file).

NOTE

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To prevent you from making changes to files you have not checked out, Visual SourceSafe designates and marks files as read-only. When you actually check out a file, Visual SourceSafe removes the read-only flag.