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Microsoft has always been adamant about their use of "dogfooding" in the software development process, and it's made tools like Excel and Visual Studio work pretty well. My question is this: Do Microsoft employees use VSS? Have they ever used it? If not, what do they actually use? It seems to be such a flawed, inadequate version control system that I can't imagine that a competent developer would put up with it!

See the following links for details:
http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html http://www.developsense.com/testing/VSSDefects.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/source-control-anything-but-sourcesafe.html

jordanhill123
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Joey
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  • This isn't a complete answer, but I am pretty sure they are now using, or migrating, to TFS. – Buddy Lindsey Aug 30 '10 at 17:17
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    Why the downvotes? I think this question is pretty clear and observation of a software giant seems pretty relevant and useful to me. – Joey Sep 01 '10 at 03:25

2 Answers2

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I believe that nowadays most of the groups either do currently use or are migrating to Team Foundation Server.

It's not clear to me that Microsoft has ever come out and described in detail the tools they use, but I have heard in some deep, dark corners of the internet that the large teams (Windows team, Office team, etc) have, for a long, long time, used what is essentially a custom version of Perforce for version control. I have been led to believe that some teams have (attempted to) made use of SourceSafe, but it's never been widespread there.

Mark
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    +1 - I'd heard same re: Perforce - and I'm not surprised. VSS, even for small teams, was very easy to corrupt - I remember the days when files > 64K (I think) would end up having every 2^16th byte dropped... – Will A Aug 30 '10 at 17:27
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They use Teamserver for source control (or so I was told whilst attending a visual studio event at the Reading campus)

Pharabus
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