Welcome to Visual SourceSafe 6.0.VSS as it's nick named as, is a part of Visual Studio 6.0 which comes with other goodies like Visual Basic,Visual C++,MSDN , Visual Interdev,Visual J++ and Visual FoxPro.Sharing a place with such maestros is something not very easy if u'r not upto it.
VSS 6.0 has a whole bunch of new features over the performance improvements.New features like moving files, filtering history information, deploying individual files, creating desktop shorcuts to VSS db, HTML help all come in handy while using VSS. With the directory structure in the left pane and the folder contents in the right pane ,VSS gives a Windows Explorer type look and feel and makes the user feel at home.Keyboard savvy ppl will love the long list of Keyboard shortcuts for almost all operations .Also VSS is intergrated with Visual C++.That means u can work with VSS from within Visual C++.Other members of Visual Studio mite also provide this support(which i'm not aware of).
What does VSS do ?
Version control is a critical facet of any team software, preventing users from accidental file loss, allowing back-tracking to previous versions, branching, merging and the managing of releases. VSS provides a robust versioning and configuration management functionality along with security and audit trail. VSS, simply put, is a source control system. Source control is highly desirable when developing software, web sites, or anywhere you may want to compare two versions of a file or return to a previous version.
How does VSS stores files
A project is a collection of interrelated files that you store in VSS. One can add, delete, edit, and share files within and among projects. A project has much in common with an normal windows folder; however, it provides additional support for file history and file version control.
Customization
Each user can customize the behavior of VSS in many ways. One can change the way that VSS behaves to optimize its performance, change the display, or insert expanding keywords into files.
Web Projects support
One of the most powerful features of VSS is to support Webmasters who are tasked with organizing and maintaining a WWW site. Typically, Web sites involve a multitude of HTML and graphics files organized into various folders. Because these files change frequently, VSS is an ideal way to keep track of file versions, archive files, and track changes to solve broken links and other problems.The basic idea is to collect a set of HTML, graphics, and supporting files that embody a Web site and check them into a VSS project.
VSS Administrator
Being an administator to anything is always tough ,but VSS comes out to rescue it's admin in a neat way.There are various ways in which the Admin can change the behavior of VSS, and that too with a few key strokes.
What u get additionally
Finally there are Several utility programs are included with VSS. Utilites like Analyse.exe which Scans a VSS database for database integrity and errors, DDCONV.exe which updates a VSS database from an older format to the current format,Unlock.exe which Frees database locks after a power failure or other unexpected loss,SS.exe which Allows MS-DOS command-line syntax to be used in Windows and the list goes on..
Some final hassles
With the increased concerns over viruses spreading over the Internet and through e-mail, many anti-virus software companies have implemented a feature that scans every file every time that the file is opened. This feature can have a dramatic impact on VSS performance. This feature is sometimes referred to as Auto-Protect or Auto-Scan. Because VSS is made up of many small file pairs, when you do a branch or other large scale VSS operation, the Auto-Scan feature can have a dramatic effect on performance. This feature can have such a dramatic effect because the operations are happening across the network and are affected by network performance. At the same time, they are also affecting other users' network performance.For this Microsoft VSS support recommends that you enable virus checking without the Auto-Scan option on the VSS server, and only do a full scan of the files on the SourceSafe server periodically.
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