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As a member of Visual Studio product family, VSS is very popular among Windows developers. An IDC August 2004 ALM market report indicates the revenue of Microsoft in the ALM market in 2003 is US$38.1M. Since Microsoft did not have any other ALM product at that time, we can assume all the Microsoft’s ALM revenue is from SourceSafe.

SourceSafe comes with some editions of Visual Studio and MSDN subscription, which makes many developers think that SourceSafe is FREE.  Actually, it is not. You paid for it. SourceSafe can also be purchased independently through a retail channel.

The list price of SourceSafe 2005 is US $549. 

The SQL Server-based Source Control Software Designed to be a SourceSafe Replacement

The Fastest SourceSafe Remote Access Tool Recommeded by Microsoft

Links:
Previous article <<<<: What is SourceSafe?
Next article >>>>: What can SourceSafe do?
SourceSafe How To series home page: VSS / SourceSafe Tutorial

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, also called ‘VSS’, is a file-system-based source control tool from Microsoft. This tool was originally developed by One Tree Software Company and later taken over by Microsoft. 

The following content is copied from Microsoft web site:

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is a file-level version control system that permits many types of organizations to work on several project versions at the same time. This capability is particularly beneficial in a software development environment, where it is used in maintaining parallel code versions. However, the product can also be used to maintain files for any other type of team.

At a minimum, Visual SourceSafe does the following:

• Helps protect your team from accidental file loss.
• Allows back-tracking to earlier versions of a file.
• Supports branching, sharing, merging, and management of file releases.
• Tracks versions of entire projects.
• Tracks modular code (one file that is reused, or shared, by multiple projects).

 

The SQL Server-based Source Control Software Designed to be a SourceSafe Replacement

The Fastest SourceSafe Remote Access Tool Recommeded by Microsoft

Links:
Next article >>>>: Market position of SourceSafe
SourceSafe How To series home page: VSS / SourceSafe Tutorial

SourceSafe / VSS is a version control tool used by many Windows developers. I started to use SourceSafe in 1995. Before I started to work on SourceAnywhere for VSS (a VSS remote access tool) in 2003, I only used very basic features of SourceSafe and did not even use integration in Visual Studio. After successfully launching SourceAnywhere for VSS, our team started another product, SourceAnywhere, the SQL-based VSS replacement. During the development process of these products I gained a deeper and deeper understanding of SourceSafe.

In this SourceSafe How To series / tutorial, I will write some guides, How To and FAQs about SourceSafe and will also post resources I found on the internet. This series will cover some basic and intermediate topics of SourceSafe as well as some advanced topics.

Although this SourceSafe tutorial can be used for anyone who is interested in SourceSafe, it is mainly for software developers. As you may have been using SourceSafe for a long time and know many features of VSS, I will try to make the table of the content easy to navigate so hopefully you can easily find the information that you are interested in.

Should you have questions or comments about SourceSafe / VSS or this series, you can contact me at kgao@dynamsoft.com.  But due to the limit of my time, there is no guarantee that you can get an answer. Nevertheless, I may publish new articles covering your feedback.

Thanks.

The SQL Server-based Source Control Software Designed to be a SourceSafe Replacement

The Fastest SourceSafe Remote Access Tool Recommeded by Microsoft

Hi everyone! This is my very first blog post.

Every day is a busy day, however, I will try my best to write something every week. I will also write some How To series to share my knowledge that I have gained from my programming experience.

I wish everyone a productive and happy day.

Thanks a lot.