Source control

[Roberto Mendoza]

Hello kids.

I'm studying about source control. I'm looking for controling tecniques to trace the changes you do into a code source.

I need a program that saves many versions of code and registers dates of change and reason, etc. Or somethig similar.

It's very usefull to remember why did you do that change a few months ago or why someone did any change in the source code.

If you can send any help, I'll be bery pleased.

[MerrionComputin]

We use Visual SourceSafe to do this.

It is a delta file revision system so you can track changes and compare versions of files and it also allows you to label particualr revisions of each file - which we do for each release.

HTH,
Duncan

[darre1]

i've never actually used visual sourcesafe myself, probably coz i've never worked in a team - is it any good?

[MerrionComputin]

If you have enterprise edition of VB or Visual Studio, you get Visual SourceSafe for free.

It is definitely worth using, even as a sole developer, if you intend to maintain multiple releases of a common code base as it allows you to split and merge revisions.

[darre1]

what advantages does it have over keeping seperate versions manually, and just using Explorer to keep track etc, bearing in mind that i'm a sole developer?

this is something i'm interesting in very much BTW coz i have Enterprise, and took a little look at Visual SourceSafe and didn't think too much too it - but then i didn't look into it much and i was pushed for time...

[honeybee]

VSS is quite good. We have been using it since last year or so.

Darre1, it basically takes the hassle out of maintaining the versions manually.

Every time you check in a file, you just need to describe in short the changes made to the file. That will help you identify a particular version of the file.

For e.g. you implemented some new functionality in one of the forms, and then your client found out it had completely goofed up, and you wish to revert back to the older version. Simply go to SourceSafe, and select the earlier version of the file, get it to your working folder, compile the project and that's it!

.

[Innofin]

I'd like to throw in a question as well.
We've been using VSS for the last year or so on a single project and it's been working great.

Now we want to use VSS on all our projects in the company. We have 4 environments: Dev, Testing, UAT and Production.
I want to know what you guys think would be the best settup for sourcesafe in such an environment. Let me explain:

We have about 100 smaller projects running. Would it be best to create a VSS Database for each environment and in each database have 100 folders, one for each project, or will one central db work with 4 main folders (one for each environment) with sub folders in for each project?

Any ideas?

[Roberto Mendoza]

Hello people.

Reading your tips; I think the best way to control the source is VSS. But, I don't know anything about this. Do you know any site to learn about VSS?

I need to learn from the begin.

Bye.

[InvisibleDuncan]

Originally posted by darre1
what advantages does it have over keeping seperate versions manually, and just using Explorer to keep track etc, bearing in mind that i'm a sole developer?

this is something i'm interesting in very much BTW coz i have Enterprise, and took a little look at Visual SourceSafe and didn't think too much too it - but then i didn't look into it much and i was pushed for time...

One of the best things about SourceSafe is that it allows you to compare versions. It can display them next to each other, and highlight any changes, i.e. where code has been changed, inserted or deleted. If you break something but know that it was working perfectly on an earlier version, this can be invaluable.

Innofin - would you really want separate versions of everything for each phase? How would you ensure that any modifications are made consistently? Would you merge them back at the end? If so, I think you'd need to keep all the environments for each project on one database, although you might want to split some of the 100 projects into different databases.

[InvisibleDuncan]

Originally posted by Roberto Mendoza
Hello people.

Reading your tips; I think the best way to control the source is VSS. But, I don't know anything about this. Do you know any site to learn about VSS?

I need to learn from the begin.

Bye.

Try here: Microsoft's SourceSafe Site

[Innofin]

InvisibleD,
To ensure that everyting gets updated up the ladder, we do a migration every two weeks to make sure that every thing that have been through UAT gets put into production & training.

So my idea was to create 5 different VSS databases (one for each environment) and everytime a project in UAT have been signed off, we just move the code in the UAT database for project X over to training & production of project X's fodler.

You thing this is wise or not?

Another thing, how big can a VSS database become? Our current code is in the region of about 7GB in each environment.

[MerrionComputin]

There is one caveat when using SourceSafe - put the sourcesafe install on it's own partition. For some reason it is not good at estimating the free space (and therefore whether it is safe to check in a file) when it shares a logical drive with others...

Also, if you are going to use it professionally I recommend that you run the Analyze -X command at least once a week to check that the code base isn't damaged in any way.

HTH,
Duncan

[Nucleus]

There is also a product called Perforce which is lot less than ClearCase, inlcudes allowing branching and reconciling of code. At work smaller teams use cvs (0-10), medium sized (10-50) use perforce, 50+ use ClearCase.

[gaffa]

I've just been doing some digging around, and I found another product called MKS Source Integrity which looks reasonable - not the full box and dice like PCVS or ClearCase, but it's a lot cheaper.

- gaffa