Visual SourceSafe vs MS Team Server?

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What solution is best? Ive heard so many developers curse VSS that Im leery
if using it. I read a LITTLE bit on MS Team Server. From what I read, in
terms of testing and communication between developers, Team Server is better,
but I see no mention of Source Control with the software. I wanted to get
your guys opinions.
 
JP said:
What solution is best? Ive heard so many developers curse VSS that Im leery
if using it. I read a LITTLE bit on MS Team Server. From what I read, in
terms of testing and communication between developers, Team Server is better,
but I see no mention of Source Control with the software. I wanted to get
your guys opinions.
Click to expand...

VSS is awful. Avoid it like the plague.

Team Foundation Server is much, much better, but still has quite a few
annoyances, IMO. Hopefully many of these will be sorted out by Visual
Studio 2008 and the next release of Team Foundation Server, but
personally I favour a different solution: Subversion.

It's free, it's open source, there's a Windows Explorer plugin
(TortoiseSvn) and a free VS plugin (AnkhSvn) as well as commercial
options available.

I've used Subversion more than TFS, but it feels *much* more
transparent. TFS does a lot of stuff behind your back (or so it feels)
which is sometimes completely wrong.

Anyway, visit http://subversion.tigris.org if you want to find out
more.
 
JP said:
What solution is best? Ive heard so many developers curse VSS that Im
leery
if using it. I read a LITTLE bit on MS Team Server. From what I read, in
terms of testing and communication between developers, Team Server is
better,
but I see no mention of Source Control with the software. I wanted to get
your guys opinions.
Click to expand...

Between VSS and Team Server, I would take Team Server. A lot of people
complain about VSS but, we never had any problems with it. Performance
starts to be a problem with more than a few developers but, VSS never lost
any code (for us at least).

We switched to Team Server about a year ago and haven't had a problem. The
source control in TFS is very high performance (SQL Server based) and you
can create a distributed environment. TFS also has a lot more than just
source control. It's pretty clear that VSS has a very limited future while
there's all sorts of neat new things coming for Team Server.
 
I've used VSS quite a bit, and played with Team Suite. I've not been happy
with either solution.

I would avoid VSS at any cost, as it's known to corrupt files and have many
issues. I've personally had repositories corrupted beyond repair on more
than 1 occasion.

I used SourceGear Vault on several projects for many years, and it always
worked well. It never once lost a file, which is really the important thing!
It's Visual Studio Integration has always had problems, which was
frustrating. In recent times Vault has gotten very expensive, and I can no
longer recommend it due to price concerns.

Recently I've been using Subversion with TortoiseSVN as the front end, and
been very happy. This solution is free, which is quite nice. FogBugz has a
nice integration with Subversion to bring Issue Tracking to the table,
although it's pretty pricey...
 
My two penny worth : avoid them both.

Use Perforce (http://www.perforce.com/) or Accurev
(http://www.accurev.com/accurev.html)

I did some tests on TFS and found its branching and merging capabilities
were just dire compared to what I'd been used to with ClearCase (which we're
switching from shortly to Accurev.)

Peforce has an enviable customer list and is cheaper than Accurev at the
cost of being less GUI-oriented and less intuitive.

Accurev is more expensive, but heavily GUI-based, which makes it easier to
use.

Also, setting up TFS is a pain. I found it cumbersome and heavy. With both
Accurev and Perforce you don't all need to be in the same domain - you just
need to be able to make a TCP connection, that's it. Plus I ran some tests
on its branching and merging and found it lost code changes when merging two
altered branches together.

We have a developer in our team who, rather than trusting ClearCase to do
his merges for him, had been *manually* merging files together. The reason?
He'd come from using VSS. When I showed him how reliable and smart ClearCase
was at doing this, he nearly fell off his chair.

Cheers,

Adam.
 
Adam Benson said:
My two penny worth : avoid them both.

Use Perforce (http://www.perforce.com/) or Accurev
(http://www.accurev.com/accurev.html)

I did some tests on TFS and found its branching and merging capabilities
were just dire compared to what I'd been used to with ClearCase (which we're
switching from shortly to Accurev.)

Peforce has an enviable customer list and is cheaper than Accurev at the
cost of being less GUI-oriented and less intuitive.
Click to expand...

Any reason not to use the free option which has good branching/merging
and numerous GUIs? (I'm referring to Subversion, of course.)

I'm genuinely interested in what advantages ClearCase or Accurev
provide over svn.
 
Hi Jon,

In all truth I didn't look at Subversion.

I'd heard about it but tend to shy away from this sort of thing. That may
well be irrational, of course, but I prefer the feeling of having a company
behind us that's responsible for supporting us, if and when we need it.

Also, I really liked Accurev's front end because it was the first ever
source control system I'd ever come across that allowed you to see the
overall tree and just right click on a point and say "I'd like to branch
from here, please." We often have problems with developers who can't seem to
get it right with Clearcase and so I felt this option would a) encourage
people to branch (which they sometimes don't when they should) b) prevent
problems when they did.

Cheers,

Adam.
===========
 
In all truth I didn't look at Subversion.

I'd heard about it but tend to shy away from this sort of thing. That may
well be irrational, of course, but I prefer the feeling of having a company
behind us that's responsible for supporting us, if and when we need it.
Click to expand...

I guess different people have different preferences. I've generally
found that open source support is actually more responsive than
commercial support - and there tend to be more releases of open source
products (partly because there's no marketing etc required with each
release). There's also the option of just going in and fixing a
problem when you find one :)
Also, I really liked Accurev's front end because it was the first ever
source control system I'd ever come across that allowed you to see the
overall tree and just right click on a point and say "I'd like to branch
from here, please." We often have problems with developers who can't seem to
get it right with Clearcase and so I felt this option would a) encourage
people to branch (which they sometimes don't when they should) b) prevent
problems when they did.
Click to expand...

I've found that most people take a while to get to grips with svn's
branching, but it's incredibly powerful, partly due to being
incredibly cheap. Creating a branch is just copying a node as far as
svn is concerned, which is really cheap (it doesn't actually copy all
the data, it just remembers when and where the original was).

However, once you understand the concepts (and in particular that you
can merge across time and/or space - it's really just a case of
applying a bunch of diffs) it's really nice.

Jon
 
Hi Jon,

In all truth I didn't look at Subversion.

I'd heard about it but tend to shy away from this sort of thing. That may
well be irrational, of course, but I prefer the feeling of having a company
behind us that's responsible for supporting us, if and when we need it.
Click to expand...

CollabNet is the corporate sponsor of Subversion. They sell
"certified" versions of Subversion which includes support.
 
What solution is best? Ive heard so many developers curse VSS that Im leery
if using it. I read a LITTLE bit on MS Team Server. From what I read, in
terms of testing and communication between developers, Team Server is better,
but I see no mention of Source Control with the software. I wanted to get
your guys opinions.
Click to expand...

Take it from us. VSS is horrible beyond articulation.

I too recommend Subversion. I've been using it for a year now (after
hearing Jon talk about it so much :)). I couldn't be more happy with
the switch. And apparently a lot of other people are happy too
because it's adoption rate is increasing expotentially.

I'm looking forward to the 1.5 release which adds merge tracking.
 
Take it from us. VSS is horrible beyond articulation.

I too recommend Subversion. I've been using it for a year now (after
hearing Jon talk about it so much :)). I couldn't be more happy with
the switch. And apparently a lot of other people are happy too
because it's adoption rate is increasing expotentially.

I'm looking forward to the 1.5 release which adds merge tracking.
Click to expand...

I use subversion at home for my own projects and Source Gear Vault at
the office for work.

I can attest that both are pretty solid solutions.
 
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