Related
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
It seems like a lot of people here and on many programmer wikis/blogs/ect. elsewhere really dislike VSS. A lot of people also have a serious dislike for cvs. In many places I have heard a lot of differing opinions on whether or not using VSS or cvs is better or worse then using no source control, please rate the worst and explain why!!!!! you rated them this way. Feel free to throw in your own horrible system in the rankings. If you feel it depends on the circumstances try to explain the some of the different scenarios which lead to different rankings.
(note:I see a lot of discussion of what is better but little of what is worse.)
second note: while both answers are nice I'm looking less for good replacements and more for a comparison of which is worse and more importantly why!
No source control at all is the worst option, no need to discuss this and this is actually not an option.
I've used VSS once (10 years ago) and apart from the fact that it had very poor third party tools support, I'll just mention that the repository got corrupted several times (sigh). This surely explain why I don't trust VSS at all and would prefer any open source tools alternative (can't be worse).
If I can avoid CVS, I do it. It kinda works, is widely supported but really lacks important features (the most important one being atomic commits). But it works (it's better than nothing or VSS).
I've used Borland Starteam on a big project. Non technical people may appreciate it's client UI but it was lacking too much important things for developers: no nice IDE integration (even in JBuilder, what an irony), no post-commit hooks, no efficient Java API (to use with Maven for example), damn slow on WAN, etc plus some other very annoying glitches (like the UI not showing directories not in view). Not horrible, but there are better solutions.
ClearCase has been a bad experience, perfect for anti-agile development (was driving me mad). And so was PVCS (a nightmare). I don't even know what to say / where to start: expensive, heavy, poor tooling, etc. People buying these tools can't be the one using them, it's not possible.
Subversion was meant to be the successor of CVS, a better CVS (by providing the missing features), is widely used, is supported by many tools and is still very recommendable. Better than any of the previous solutions.
Then we have DVCS like Mercurial, Git which are more powerful, but require more skills to be used and are still lacking of tools support/integration (using the command line is not an option for everybody). Still, they are recommendable, depending on the context (not everybody needs more power) and Mercurial would have my preference because I find it more friendly.
This is nicely summarized on this picture from Martin Fowler's VersionControlTools page:
He must have read my mind when he wrote this page :)
In my experience -
Git > SVN > CVS > PVCS > none > VSS
Reasoning -
1.) Git - nice distributed model; initially some lack of support on Windows, but now works with any OS; lots of tool/IDE support.
2.) SVN - pretty standard; there can be a small amount of pain setting up server initially, but nothing major; works with pretty much everything.
3.) CVS - old; kind of a pain to work with; but still works with pretty much everything (OS, IDE, tools).
4.) PVCS - proprietary; not integrated into many tools/IDEs; overcomplicated workflow compared to other modern version control system.
4.) none - definitely not preferred, but at least you aren't fooling yourself. This is still pretty inexcusable in this day and age with so many options and Source Control being such a well known best practice.
5.) VSS - definitely not preferred; mostly replaced by TFS; unstable; can silently fail; worse than nothing because you're fooling yourself that it will actually keep your source safe.
The thing about VSS is:
it is a virtual certainty that if you use VSS for any length of time it will eventually corrupt it's repository and require restoring from backup.
that's not even the biggest disadvantage to using it
A batch script that makes a zip of a source folder archive with today's date as the filename is about 10% more powerful and 5x more reliable than VSS.
No source control is definitely worst. You need to keep a history and backup of your code, even if you program by yourself.
Then I would say VSS. I've used it (years ago) and it works, but is basically nothing like a modern source control system. It's better than nothing, but since there are so many free options that work great, I wouldn't really recommend VSS unless you're unfortunate to be in a "MS-Only" shop and have the mindset of "We'll use it 'cause it came with MSDN" which unfortunately I've see too often.
A tiny step above VSS is SourceGear Vault. http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/ It's a 3rd party source control that is basically rewritten from scratch VSS but works better with remote users. I wouldn't really recommend this either, but if it's all you can get approved, is an option.
CVS is better than these. It's free, open source, provides good history and branching/merging support, and enables concurrent development without locking.
SVN is better still and the choice of many. It's free, open source, but also has commercial backing from a number of sources (i.e., you can buy support if you need it). There are many great tools available and it provides very good concurrent development without locking.
The next step is newer distributed version control systems like Git or Mercurial. As far as I understand it, in these systems each user usually gets a complete copy of the repo and has their own local set of branches and history. They can work 100% locally including commits and branches and rollbacks and everything, and when ready, push a set of changes upstream. This can continue in many different configurations fulfilling a variety of needs.
Perforce >>>> CVS > VSS > SVN.
Perforce is the best by far. Everything works fine. I use it mainly integrated in IDE because the integration was good. I use the interface for more advanced tasks.
CVS worked fine, though it was command line only (i used an old version).
VSS was merely ok. It became way too slow after the team grows to 10 people. It was an old version though.
SVN is currently what i use and its non-functionning. At least Tortoise SVN. Status often wont update in explorer, it often fails to track the history of modifications, you always need to clean up their database and their tree is confusing. I would rather do the source control manually than using this tool. But it is not my call so i am stuck with it in my current job, sigh....
VSS is good to use for source control.
We have this huge application that has 18 projects in our source control (VSS).
Whenever we are working on small changes everything is fine because each developer has a set of a few files checked out to himself, and hopefully no one is going to need them until they are checked in (in about 4 to 8 hours).
But when we want to work on big changes a developer keeps so many files checked out for some days and make it hard for others to do their assigned tasks.
Here's a scenario for example:
Last week we wanted to implement a feature that will fetch every list in our application using a paging mechanism. Therefore we should change the UI, business and data access layers.
There's a developer assigned to this task, she's checked out a lot of files, and she's blocking other tasks.
How should we plan to develop these kind of features?
Switch to a better Version Control System. VSS suffers from design issues and its hard lock principles. Subversion is available for free and can be used for large scale application development. Branching and tagging are cheap operations and there is no hard lock.
Your company will definitively live better with Subversion. Try it out!
Server Easy to setup on what system ever (Windows/Linux)
TortoiseSVN Client for Windows that integrates within Windows Explorer
SVN Manual Read at least the first few chapters
There are many other alternatives but VSS is a pain in large scale development. As there is a better free solution available, why stick to a vendor?
If upgrading to a real VCS isn't an option right now, have the person doing the major feature download a local copy of everything and then make his changes outside of version control. Merge it all at once (over a weekend or something in case it gets complicated).
This doesn't help the developer who will need version control while making the "big changes"
Well, you do what you gotta do with the tools you've got. He could always install a modern VCS like git which works locally. Just check the entire baseline into git (minus history) and go.
VSS sucks, migrate to a real SCM, microsoft will probably help you seamlessly upgrade to TFS which doesn't have this problem. Or migrate to any one of FOSS SCMs like subversion, but the transition will probably be harder (but may be cheaper).
Have you considered sharing and branching? Also, you can allow multiple checkouts with users who have experience. In your case of making a large application change, I suggest labeling then creating a branch. If something happens to "big changes", you will not the production version. You can make your quick fixes in the released code then merge them into "big changes" once it is ready. Check the help topic "Sharing and Branching".
Use a version control system that works in merge mode (optimistic), not in lock mode.
Merge mode is optimistic is that it assumes changes will usually not be made in the same place. If it happens in the same place then it is usally easy to resolve.
An example of a version control system that can work in merge mode is CVS. It is outdated now, but others exist.
SVN is the answer to your problems. I have used it and its a breeze to learn/work with it. But there are a few new kids on the block. Try GIT. I have been hearing a lot about it althought havent had a chance to try it
VSS is just an old story, we use Subversion (server) and TortoiseSVN (client) now. (That's just based on our preference)
By the way, migrating to other version control / source control - only - will not solve your team issue. The problem is about communication. If she can't communicate with the others and stay with her habit (working with a lot of files without checking them in), she will put your team down, you must let her know how to work with team using version control. If not, she will put you into "Merge" problems when using Subversion. ^^
You already got the advice about changing to a usable VCS.
Above that, you and the developers should train to break the big changes into smaller ones. I'd consider about 10 commits per day and full time developer a normal rate. It makes the locks much less painful.
The principle should be: make the smallest possible change that brings you toward your desired state and works (as in the software compiles and passes all tests).
In the case you sketched out. Adding a parameter to one layer, and changing all calls to that layer (possibly with a dummy value) would be one change. Actually using that value, would be another change.
This should result in much less files locked for a much shorter period.
Long-term, you'll want to migrate to another VCS. As others have mentioned, consider either open source or TFS if you want to stick with MS. (We use TFS, but I'm not going to sing its praises - it's OK.) As AMissico mentioned, branching will help with any VCS that supports it. Learning to use branching effectively is not trivial, and will require study and/or training.
Continuous Integration will also help. TeamCity is what we use, and it's relatively simple to set up. See FeatureBranch.
Around here we have been working with a bunch of Visual Source Safe repositories for about 10 years or so.
Now I want to get rid of sourcesafe and move on to Team Foundation Server.
Do you have any tips or tricks for me before I embark on this migration? What are the things I have to be careful about?
I am sure this migration will mean that our working habits have to be modified in some way. Do you think that these changes could be a problem for the organization? Think about a group of about 20 .NET developers in a single site.
There are a few different ways you can migrate. The tool will pull your history, etc. over, but the more pragmatic and simple way is to lock VSS as a history archive and start fresh:
Have everyone check in all changes into VSS, make sure everything builds, etc.
Set all VSS databases to "locked" (read-only rights for all users)
Get Latest on the entire VSS database into a "clean" set of folders on a workstation
Check all of the files into TFS from the workstation
For any history prior to the conversion, folks need to go to VSS, but after a week or two it's realistically unlikely to happen all that often. And you know that the history in VSS is accurate and not corrupted by the conversion process.
Be aware that TFS does not support sharing files between different projects, as VSS does. If you have any such shared files the link between them will be broken during the migration, resulting in initially identical, but now distinct files in each project. Updates to one of these files in TFS will no longer propagate to the copies in the other projects.
If you do choose to use the VSSConverter.exe tool that ships with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, then you should install TFS 2008 SP1 first as it includes a number of improvements as detailed on this blog by the migration tools team.
Some of the key features of the
release include:
Elimination of namespace conflicts. I
previously blogged about this as "the
rename problem" and we have fixed the
converter to correctly migrate files
with overlapping namespaces. This was
the biggest pain point for most users
trying to use previous versions of the
tool.
Automatic solution rebinding.
In this latest version, VS solution
files will be automatically upgraded
to the 9.0 version and checked back in
to version control. Previously users
were required to do this manually.
Correcting of timestamp
inconsistencies. The use of client
timestamps by VSS can lead to
revisions being recorded in the
opposite order that they actually
occurred in. The tool now recognizes
this issue and continues migrating
changes where it would previously
fail.
Improved logging. Although
we've fixed a lot of issues, providing
better, more detailed logging will
help users that do run into issues
diagnose the problems.
I just googled, but this walkthrough seems like a good reference, and it mentions the tool VSSConverter which should help you make the migration as painless as possible.
I would like to recommend one thing though: Backup. Backup everything before you do this. Should anything go wrong it's better to be safe than sorry.
My links aren't showing up. This is the address: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181247(VS.80).aspx
We are currently in the process of doing this at my day job. We are actually making the switch over in about a month. I am a main part of the migration and a big part of why we are getting off of SourceSafe. To help in the migration, I used the Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image. It was very useful. Right off the bat, the image contains a full working TFS installation for you to play and demo with. It also includes Hands on Labs and one of the labs is running the VSS -> TFS migration tool. If you have an MSDN subscription, once you have played with the image, the next step would be to install the TFS Small Team edition that comes with your subscription.
One thing to note is to make sure you get the latest Service Packs for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework installed on the image. The service packs fixed some annoying bugs and it definately increased the usability of the system. We have a farely large SourceSafe database with about 90+ projects and the migration tool took about 32 hours to complete. First I made a backup of our sourcesafe database for testing. Then I made the migration on the test sourcesafe database. Afterwards, I checked the source tree in TFS and everything transferred fine. We kept all the history for our source files from VSS which was great. No need to keep that stinking VSS database around after we go live.
We are taking the migration in steps. First the source control and letting our developers get use to using it. Then after that we will be migrating the QA and Business Analysts over to use the Work Item tracking features.
My advice is to take the migration in steps. Don't do too much at one time. Give time for people who will be using the system to train up.
VSS Converter is a far from perfect solution. And there are significant differences between the 2005 and the 2008SP1 version of the converter.
For example, in a VSS DB that's been in use for a long time, there will have been a large number of users contributing to VSS. Many of these users will have left the organisation a long time ago and therefore will no longer have domain accounts. TFS requires mapping VSS users to domain accounts, so you will have to decide whether you map old users to a single 'dummy' domain account or to a current team member.
In addition, VSS Converter 2008 requires these domain accounts to be valid TFS accounts. Whereas the 2005 converter does not enforce this.
If your VSS history contains significant folder Moves, then it's likely you will loose all history before this Move. For example, if you Move a folder to a new location, then Delete the previous parent, you will loose all history. See this article for more explanation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253166.aspx
In one migration I was involved with, we had a 10 year old VSS database that lost all history prior to 6 months ago. This was due to a significant tidy up that took place 6 months ago.
TFS conversion tool <-- Use this
I've used this tool for some times already, the results are pretty satisfatory as it comes with the history of changesets from SourceSafe if you desire too.
Anyway, using this tool you should always pay attention to errors and warnings in the log, and check if everything built okay / passed okay.
It's recomended to also run an Analysis on SS before running this.
Hope it helps
Good guidance there from my former colleage Guy Starbuck. Another thing to add with that approach - you may have decided over time that you want to refactor the way your application is organized (folders etc) and this will give you an oppurtunity to do so.
I've been in situations where we organized a solution haphazardly without thought (let alone major changes in the application) which led to a desire to organize things differently - and the move from VSS to TFS is a great oppurtunity to do so.
As far as the original question:
And: this migration will for sure mean that our working habits have to be modified in some way. Do you think that this changes could be a problem for the organization? Think to a group of about 20 .net developers, in a single site
I would say - yes your working habits will change but much more for the better.
You no should use "Check-out" Locks and "Get-Latest on Check-out".
You can now effectively Branch and Merge
You will now have "Changesets" all files checked-in at the same time will be grouped together. This makes historical change tracking much easier - but more importantly - rollbacks are much easier (ie find all files checked in at the same time and roll them back)
Associating Check-ins to Work Items. Don't overlook Work Items! The biggest mistake you can make is to only use TFS as a VSS replacement. The Build and Project Management features are excellent - you paid for them - USE THEM!
As far as details on how your experience will change, another former colleague of mine (and Team System MVP) Steve St. Jean wrote a detailed article on the differences: From VSS to TFS
What would be the best version control system to learn as a beginner to source control?
Anything but Visual Source Safe; preferably one which supports the concepts of branching and merging. As others have said, Subversion is a great choice, especially with the TortoiseSVN client.
Be sure to check out (pardon the pun) Eric Sink's classic series of Source Control HOWTO articles.
I'd suggest you try Subversion, for example with the 1-click SVN installer. Try searching SO for "Subversion", and you'll find loads of questions with answers that point to good tutorials.
Good luck!
I'd go straight for Git. I've used subversion before, but always felt like I was doing it wrong. Git made sense from day one.
Useful resources:
Linus Torvals on Git
Scott Chacon "Getting Git"
There are a few core concepts that I think are important to learn:
Check-ins/check-outs (obviously)
Local versions vs. server versions
Mapping/Binding a local workspace to a remote store or repository.
Merging your changes back into a file that contains changes from
others.
Branching (what it is, when/why to use it)
Merging changes from a branch back into a main branch or trunk.
Most modern source control systems require some knowledge of the above topics and should help facilitate you learning them. Then you have distributed source control, which I don't have any experience with but is supposed to be fairly complicated and may not be suitable for a beginner.
Subversion is great because it has all of the modern features you'd want and is free.
Git is also becoming an increasingly popular option and is another free or very low cost alternative to Subversion. Knowledge regarding the concepts of branching and merging become critical for using Git, however.
You can use unfuddle as a free and easy way to experiment with both Git and Subversion. I use it to host a couple of subversion repositories for some side projects I've worked on in the past.
I'm not and advanced source control user, but I'm learning. Here is my experience with source control products:
A long time ago, the company I was working for at the time decided to use source control. They introduced the concept to developers and got eveyone willing to give it a try. They chose to use PVCS, and implemented it. Before too long, developers would have to coordinate to lock/unlock modules and objects and we really didn't see much benefit.
A few years later, I was playing around with making an open source project and at the time rubyforge was offering CVS repositories. I tried it out and it was marginally better than PVCS. Granted I was the only one using the repository. I did however become frustrated when I tried to rearrange the structure of my files because I didn't like the way I had initially imported them. It didn't really work out in CVS.
A few years after that I was working on another personal project and my web hosting provider offered easy to setup Subversion (SVN) repositories. It took me a little bit of research to get it up and running correctly, but once I got past the initial learning curve, I liked it.
Not long after that I realized that I liked having source control and that my current job didn't have it. So I evangelized, and after a long period of time, my team implemented Source Safe because we work in Visual Studio and are generally a Microsoft shop. I was eager to use it, but before long I found that I was losing files and that Visual Studio was putting things in the wrong place and that I'd work on a project for a while and then go to export my work to another location and find that it either wouldn't export or would only export some of the projects in a solution. This made me realize that even though I thought I was using a "version control system", the copy of the code that was most secure, robust and complete was my working copy. The exact opposite of what source control is supposed to do.
So last week I was so fed up with Source Safe that I went searching. After looking into a few solutions, I decided to try git. I won't say it's all been roses, since I have again had some learning curve to get it to do what I want it to do, However, I have liked it enough to convert all of my work and personal projects over to it. One of the really nice things about it is that I don't need a centralized repository so I can use it without going through a ton of red tape at work to get it installed.
So in short I would reccommend git, I use Mysysgit in windows and it has the added bonus of giving me a bash shell. On Linux you can just install it from your package manager. If you don't like git, try subversion. If you don't like either of those you probably won't like CVS or PVCS either. Under no circumstances try Source Safe, it's awful.
I found http://unfuddle.com saved me messing about with installing SVN or git. You can get a free account in there and use either of those - plus you can use your OpenID there.
Then you avoid having to mess about setting it up right and focus on how you're going to use it!
Vault from SourceGear.com is superb. It is free for single users and provides a superb VS 2005/2008 interface. I love it!
rp
#Ian Nelson:
I agree with you that Source Safe is bad as a source control system, but keep in mind that using Source Safe is a lot better than "carrying around floppy disks" as Joel Spolsky said.
For a beginner it might not be a bad idea, since the cost of having no source control at all is a lot higher.
Each tool has it's strengths and weaknesses. It's very much a question of what your requirements are. Unfortunately with this issue, like many others, it's often not the best tool that is selected but the one that someone is familiar with. For instance, if you don't require many branches and your team is small and local, almost any vcs will do the job (except SourceSafe). Things change if you need branches (which almost by necessity means you also need to do merges), your team is distributed, you need advanced security (subcontractors are not allowed to entire source tree), task tracking, etc. There is also the question of cost in three different ways: cost of licenses, cost of maintenance (some tools are so complicated that you in practice need someone just to control the repositories) and cost of training.
Therefore suggesting one tool over another is like suggesting what would be the best programming language.
Just some pointers:
StarTeam is the easiest of the tools
I have used. It required very little
training. I got a one-day training
since I was to be the maintainer.
This maintaining took me less than 30
minutes per week. Users I "trained"
by writing a two-page manual and
after that I had very few questions
to answer.
Continuus was the other end of the
scale as far as ease of use is
concerned. On the other hand task handling was great and it offered good support for release management. Trouble is, even as a release manager I never thought ease of making releases (it was once you learned how, but that took a considerable amount of time) should be more important than the daily work that developers do.
Merging and branch creating differs
wildly between tools. Some tools make
this simple, like git and ClearCase
(although the latter is very slow)
some basically force you to do the
merge by hand. If you need to do
merges a lot, the cost can get high.
ClearCase was also expensive in all
three categories mentioned before
(although it has to be said we used
all the advanced stuff which isn't
necessary). Git on the other hand
lacks a good UI and some of concepts
differ from what you might be used
to. Git's security features are also
lacking (gitosis addresses some
issues but not all).
Most tools I have used are also quite
slow. Tools like PVCS/Dimensions was
just slow, no matter what (basic
things like opening a directory in
the repository), some very slow in
more specific ways (like ClearCase).
From the tools I have used I would select StarTeam if your developers are not very experienced (and if you don't mind paying the license, which is quite expensive) and git if you have some experienced vcs guys onboard who can set up the environment to other guys. Mercurial also looks like an interesting competitor and seems to have slightly better UI's.
Continuus, PVCS/Dimensions and ClearCase are just too slow, too complex and too expensive for almost any project. If someone insist on selecting one of these, I would go for ClearCase.
I haven't used Subversion which many seem to like (yet, I have a feeling this is about to change in the near future) so can't comment how it compares to the other tools I have used (usually as a build and/or release manager).
As for the first tool to choose, problem with Git, Bazaar and Mercurial is they are distributed vcs's. This is different from the traditional server-client model where you have a central repository. For just learning the stuff I would recommend also reading about the concepts. Branching for instance is something that you might not understand correctly just by trying yourself (there are different branch strategies for different situations). Plus it is very different if you are the only one accessing the repository, merge conflicts for instance wouldn't be a problem (you might get to see them but you would easily also fix them since you know the code in both branches). Of course you would learn about check outs, check ins, and such but I don't think these issues are particularily difficult in the first place.
Added problem with vcs's is that they tend to use different terms. In StarTeam which is otherwise easy to use they for some reason insist on using the terms "check out" and "check out and lock". The latter is what most people think the first does. There is a reason for this (you can edit files even if you don't have an exclusive lock), but it would still make much more sense to call these "Get" and "Check out" to avoid confusion.
Anything, but I would learn a modern system like git or subversion myself. My first VCS was RCS, but I got the basics down.
Well, if you are just wanting to learn on your own, I would say you should go with something free, like subversion. If you are a company who has never used source control before, then it really depends on your needs.
My first exposure was CVS with WinCVS as a client. it was horrid. Next was Subversion, with TortoiseSVN and Eclipse's integration. It was intuitive, and heavenly. I think that using CVS with TortoiseCVS and Eclipse's would be nice as well, though I prefer the way SVN handles revisioning. The entire repository is versioned with each check in, not individual files.
I'd also recommend Subversion. It does not take too long to set up, it is free, and there is a really good book available online that goes over the basics as well as some advanced topics: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
Subversion with tortoisesvn. (tortoisesvn because you can see a lot of what goes on visually and will provide a good jumping off point for the command line stuff. ) There is tons of documentation out there and most likely you will see it at least one point in your career. Almost every company I have worked for and interviewed with runs SVN.
If you're looking to learn a commercial product while getting started Perforce provides a free client and server, with the server supporting two users and five client workspaces.
At my previous place of employment it was used religiously not only for code by our programmers, but for art assets and game levels, and my own documentation.
Subversion is good place to start with. It is very stable and modern version control system.
Best online resource to start learning about Subversion would be Version Control with Subversion. There are lot of choices as far as server and client softwares are concerned. I personally prefer (for Windows environment).
VisualSVN server
TortoiseSVN shell-integrated client and
AnkhSVN Visual Studio Subversion Add-On
Again, with Subversion there are lot of options available. Also, it is a continually evolving version control system (unlike outdated SourceSafe). It could be easily integrated with numerous automated build tools (CruiseControl, FinalBuilder) and bug/issue tracking systems (JIRA).
If you are looking for state-of-the-art version control systems, go for Git(developed by Linus Torvalds). But if you are totally new to version control systems, I would suggest start with subversion.
I've been programming for 10+ years now for the same employer and only source code control we've ever used is VSS. (Sorry - That's what they had when I started). There's only ever been a few of us; two right now and we usually work alone, so VSS has worked ok for us. So, I have two questions: 1) Should we switch to something else like subversion, git, TFS, etc what exactly and why (please)? 2) Am I beyond all hope and destined to eternal damnation because VSS has corrupted me (as Jeff says) ?
Wow - thanks for all the great responses!
It sounds like I should clearify a few things. We are a MS shop (Gold parntner) and we mostly do VB, ASP.NET, SQL Server, sharepoint & Biztalk work. I have CS degree so I've done x86 assembly C, C++ on DEC Unix and Slackware Linux in a "time out of mind" ...
My concern with VSS is that now I'm working over a VPN a lot more and VSS's performance sux and I'm afraid that our 10+ y/o version 5 VSS database is going to get hoosed...
There's the LAN service that's supposed to speed things up, but Ive never used it and I'm not sure it helps with corruption - has anyone used the VSS LAN service? (new with VSS 2005)
I'd probably go with Subversion, if I were you. I'm a total Git fanatic at this point, but Subversion certainly has some advantages:
simplicity
abundance of interoperable tools
active and supportive community
portable
Has really nice Windows shell integration
integrates with visual studio (I think - but surely through a third party)
Git has many, many other advantages, but the above tend to be the ones people care about when asking general questions like the above.
Edit: the company I now work for is using VisualSVN server, which is free. It makes setting up a Subversion repository on a Windows server stupid simple, and on the client we're using TortoiseSVN (for shell integration) and AnkhSVN for Visual Studio support. It's quite good, and should be fairly easy for even VSS users to pick up.
Latter-day Edit: So....nearly eight years later, I would never recommend Subversion to anyone for any reason. I don't really recant, per se, because I think my advice was valid at the time. However, in 2016, Subversion retains almost none of the advantages it used to have over Git. The tooling for Git is superior to (and much more diverse) what it once was, and in particular, there's GitHub and other good Git hosting providers (BitBucket, Beanstalk, Visual Studio Online, just off the top of my head). Visual Studio now has Git support out-of-the-box, and it's actually pretty good. There are even PowerShell modules to give a more native Windows experience to denizens of the console. Git is even easier to set up and use than Subversion and doesn't require a server component. Git has become as ubiquitous as any single tool can be, and you really would only be cheating yourself to not use it (unless you just really want to use something not-Git). Don't misunderstand - this isn't me hating on Subversion, but rather me recognizing that it's a tool from another time, rather like a straight razor for shaving.
Looks like SubVersion is the winner here. I'd do yourself a favor and use VisualSVN Server. It's free and will save you a bunch of installation headaches.
If you're used to the way VSS works, check out (no pun intended) Sourcegear's vault. It's an excellent way to migrate away from VSS as it comes with IDE integration and supports check out / check in, but when you're ready and feel comfortable you can also move to the edit update commit style of programming found in SVN.
It's free for single developers, runs on IIS and is built on .net so it should be a fairly familiar stack for you to switch to.
Whatever you do, don't change for the sake of changing.
If it's working for you and you're not having problems with it, I don't see any reason to switch.
For what it's worth, Perforce is a potential option if you truly stick to 1 or 2 users. Current perforce docs says you have have 2 users and 5 clients without having to start purchasing licenses.
You might have reasons to switch to perforce depending on your workflow and if you have need of branching the way perforce does it. Not being overly familar with some the other products mentioned here, I can't tell you how perforce compares in the feature department for things like branching, etc.
It is speedy, and it's been rock solid for us (300+ developers on a 10+ year old codebase). We store several T of info and it's been quite responsive. With a small number of users, I doubt that you'd experience many performance troubles assuming you had good hardware for your server.
Having used VSS before, I believe that you can get so many benefits out of a better SCM system that switching should be considered regardless of whether you have corruption or not. Branching alone might be worth it for you. A true client/server model, better interfaces (programmatically and command line) are a couple of other things that could really help just improve your workflow and help somewhat with productivity.
In summary, my view of Perforce is:
It's fast and quite reliable
Plenty of cross platform client tools (windows, unix, mac, etc)
it's free for 2 users and 5 clients
Integrates into developer studio (and other tools)
Has a powerful branching system (that might or might not be right for you).
Has several scriptable interfaces (python, perl, ruby, C++)
Certainly YMMV -- I only offer this alternative up as something that might be worthwhile looking into.
I've recently started using Mercurial for some of my work. It's a distributed system like Git but seems easier to use and seems far better supported on Windows, the latter of which was crucial for me.
With distributed source code control every user has a complete local copy of the repository. If you're the only person working on a project, as you say you often are, this can simplify things a lot since you just create your own repository and do all your commits etc. locally. If you want to bring on other developers later you can just push the full contents of your repository - current versions and all history - to another system, either on a shared server or directly on to another users' workstation.
If you're working only with a local repository remember you'll need a also backup solution as there isn't a copy of all your code on a shared server.
I think that Mercurial has lots of other advantages over Subversion, but it does have a big downside which has already been mentioned as a plus point of Subversion: there a lots of third party tools and integrations for Subversion. As Mercurial hasn't been around nearly as ong the choice is much less. On Windows it seems that you either have to use the command line (my choice) or the TortoiseHg Windows Explorer integration.
VSS is horrible. I may be channelling Spolsky (not sure if he's said this), but using VSS is actually worse than not using source control at all. Despite its name, it isn't safe. It creates the illusion of safety without providing it.
Without VSS, you'd probably be making regular backups of your code. With VSS, you'll think, "Mehh, it's already under source control. Why bother backing up?" Great until it corrupts your entire codebase and you lose everything. (This, incidentally, happened at a company I worked at.)
Get rid of VSS as soon as you can and switch to a real source control solution.
Don't worry about VSS corrupting you, worry about VSS corrupting your data. It does not have a good track record in that department.
Back up frequently if you do not switch to a different version control system. Backups should be happening daily even with other SCMs, but it's doubly important with VSS.
I like using Subversion for my personal projects. I could go down the list of features and pretend like it brings a lot to the table that other source control systems don't, but there's tons of good ones out there and the right choices is really a matter of style. If you check in after each small change (i.e. one checkin per function change), then many people can work on the same source file with very low risk of merge conflicts in practically anything but VSS (I haven't used VSS in years but from what I remember only one person at a time can work on a file.) If this isn't ever going to happen to you, I feel like the best course of action is to use what you know. VSS is better than no source control at all, but it feels restrictive to me these days.
I don't think you're beyond hope because you're asking if it would be better to switch; you're beyond hope when the answer is obvious and you ignore the evidence.
Even if you don't change source control systems, you ought to pick one like SVN or git and spend a few weeks reading about it and making a small project using it; it always helps to sharpen the saw.
I don't agree with the people that say that if you don't have problems you'd better not switch.
I think that SCM is some of the disciplines a good developer should know well, and frankly, even if you master VSS you are just experimenting a small fraction of the advantages a good SCM tool and SCM strategy can do for you and for your team.
Obviously evaluate and test the alternatives first in a non-production environment.
At work we use subversion with TortoiseSVN - works very nicely but it is philosophically different to VSS (not really a problem if there's just you but worth being aware of). I really like the fact that the whole repository has a revision number.
Given a free choice I'd've probably gone with vault but at the time I had zero budget.
I'm looking at things for personal use. There are reasons to use subversion and reasons to use something completely different. The alternatives I'm considering are Vault (as before, free for single use) and Bazaar. GIT I've had to dismiss as I am, unashamedly, a Windows person and right now GIT just isn't.
The distributed nature of GIT and the option of private/temporary checkins (assuming I've understood what I've read) is attractive - hence my looking at Bazaar.
Update: I did some more digging and playing and I actually went for Mercurial for personal use, integrated install with TortoiseHg makes things very simple and it seems to be well regarded. I'm still trying to work out how to force an automagic mirror of commits to a server and there appear to be some minor limitations to the ignore function but its doing the job nicely so far...
Murph
I'd say stick with what works for you. Unless you are having issues with VSS, why switch? Subversion is swell, though a little sticky to begin using it. TFS is far better than VSS, though it is fairly expensive for such a small team. I have not used git so I can't really speak to it.
i used vss for years until switching to svn about two years ago. my biggest complaints about vss were the poor network performance (that problem may be solved now) and the pessimistic locking of files. svn solved both those, is easy to set up (i use collabnet server and tortoisesvn client, although there are two good visual studio plugins: visualsvn - commercial, and ankhsvn - open source), easy to use and administer, and well documented.
it's tempting to say "if it's not broken then don't fix it" but you would get to learn a more modern source control tool and, perhaps more importantly, new ways of using source control (e.g. more frequent branching and merging) that the new tool would support.
If you only have 2 people, and you mostly work independantly, git is going to give you a lot more flexibility, power, and be far and away the fastest to work with.
It is however a pain in the backside to use. Using VSS you're obviously programming for windows - if you're doing Win32 API stuff in C then git will be a learning curve but will be quite interesting.
If the depths of your knowledge however only extend to ASP and Visual Basic, just use subversion. Walk before you can run.
** I'm not trying to say if you only know VB you're dumb or anything like that, but that git can be very finicky and picky to use (if you've used the WinAPI in C you know all about picky and finicky), and you may want a more gradual introduction to SCM than git provides
If you are a one man show and strictly a Microsoft shop, then SourceGear Vault is definitely a prime candidate for switching too.
Features:
Free for Single User, great for you
It uses SQL Server for it's backend, therefore data reliability is huge
It has atomic check-ins, all files checked-in at the same time are arranged in a group and are called a changeset.
VisualStudio integration.
Has a tool for importing from SourceSafe, therefore you can keep your history
The client communicates with the server over HTTP, therefore accessing the source outside the office remotely can be setup very easily and performs well, because they only transfer the deltas of the changes being submitted and received. You can use SSL to secure the connection.
I would definately consider this as an option.
If you want a full Life Cycle in one package then you probably want want to look at Visual Studio Team System. It does require a server, but you can get a "Action Pack" from MS that includes all the licencies that you need for "Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition" from the Partner centre.
With this you will get Bug, Risk and Issue tracking as well as many other features :)
Source Control
Work Item Tracking (Requirements, Bugs, Issues, Risks and Tasks)
Reporting on your project data (Work Item Tracking, Build, Checkins and more in one qube)
Code Analysis
Unit Testing
Load Testing
Performance Analysis
Automated Build