Like most people who have developed in a Microsoft technology, I have had more than one delightful experience working with Visual Source Safe 6.0 for my source control solutions. Without exception, these experiences have ranged from slightly tolerable to a complete and total pain in the butt. I think the most productive implementation was while working at Ipswitch, but that still had some issues for developers when it came time to deploy or branch code.

Now that I'm on my own, I still need to be careful with my code not just for day to day development, but also for archival of projects in a place less volatile than my development machine. I found this out after suffering a total RAID failure one day and had to trust my daily backups using Retrospect Express HD an application that has to be one of the most worthless pieces of crap ever created.

I digress...maybe my backup woes deserve a blog entry of their own.

So, looking at the various source control solutions available to a single developer shop it became quite clear that there were very few workable choices. I had two primary requirements that needed to be addressed - access to the repository from the LAN, and remote access via the Internet for access when I'm away from the office.

I quickly discounted the windows implementation of CVS because of the complexity in setup. Going through the installation instructions for CVS was more than a little bit confusing, and the shares and steps required to set it up for remote access made me quickly abandon that option. Also, since I'm lazy, I wanted to have integration with Visual Studio 2005 which appeared cumbersome at the very least.

Microsoft has released Team Foundation Server which has all of the features that I was looking for but for a single developer, TFS would be like using a cannon to kill a grasshopper.

I remember browsing around my MSDN subscription one day that Visual Source Safe 2005 had been released. Some quick Google searching led me to believe that the 2005 version was much less painful than 6.0...of course, that's not setting the bar very high.

I had just received a new "basic" server so I figured this would be a good opportunity to give VSS2005 a fair shot.

The setup process was very straight-forward. Basically, on the server you install everything.

Once the install is complete I created a new database, specified any custom user accounts and then set the database to be remotely accessible. The setup for remote access was a bit convoluted, but didn't take long to figure out and configure.

Next, I installed VSS2005 onto my development machine. I selected the Visual Source Safe (LAN) option for the plug-in in Visual Studio, connected to the database and added my first project to the VSS database.

Finally, the real test - installation and connection on my laptop which will be used to connect when I'm working remotely. Install went as expected and I set the configuration options in Visual Studio for the VSS (Remote) plug-in. This included specifying a URL and a share.

Now for the moment of truth...connect to the repository and get the latest version of the project. Simple enough...go to the File menu and select 'Open web site...' which gave me the option to use Source Safe (Internet) to select my project. I found the project I was looking for, selected it, and found myself looking at source controlled files for my desired project.

Granted, the loading process and the check-out/check-in processes are not as fast as they are on the LAN. Duh. 100Mbit Ethernet is going to be faster than an 802.11g connection over DSL, but it's more than fast enough for me. The most important part for me is I now have access via the web to my source controlled projects and don't have to worry about working disconnected from local copies and then having to merge when I get back to the office.

Visual Source Safe prior to version 2005 was pitiful...and that's being very kind. Now, with this new version, I would encourage small companies that don't want to go to the expense and overhead of Team Foundation Server to give some consideration to Visual Source Safe 2005. I'm very happy that I did, and I think you will be, too.