Working for one of my clients this afternoon, I had to figure out a reasonable way to work with Visual SourceSafe. I program on a Mac, and my only access to Windows is via a Parallels installation of Windows Vista.
That’s not really the problem, Parallels is a stunningly good piece of software, and I think Vista is the least annoying of the Microsoft Operating Systems. So I can access VSS fairly easily. The problem is what an incredible hunk of junk that software is.
So really, if any Windows programmers read this, could you tell me if people at Microsoft are honestly forced to use that software? Why? Have you ever used good source control software? BitKeeper? SVN? GIT? What is it that is good about VSS? Is it just the trivial integration with Microsoft’s dev tools?
Look, I hate operating system wars. I just don’t care anymore, they aren’t worth fighting for me. But I simply don’t understand how VSS is still in the world and still used by anyone. Not when even ancient, cruddy old CVS is better, faster, and easier to use. VSS has absolutely no advantages I can see.
It makes me happy that this particular job was bid as an hourly gig. VSS overhead is adding significantly to the time I’m using and thus charging. Fine by me. If you are going to insist I use a moron tool, then you’ll need to pay for the time wasted.
Technorati Tags: vss, sourcesafe, version control
3 responses so far ↓
1 por // May 23, 2007 at 1:21 am
is VSS a running Service
2 Uriel Katz // May 31, 2007 at 10:44 am
in my work we use Vss,and it is a piece of junk.
in my projects i work with a remote svn and that work faster than a Vss in a network.
i think people at Microsoft use Visual Studio team edition which is way better,but still not as good as svn
3 Ex-Softy // Jul 14, 2008 at 7:13 pm
No, MS does not use VSS for source control. It just does not scale well enough to handle a large division of programs.
However, I have seen some groups use VSS for PM specs. But PMs aren’t real programmers =)
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