Save us from VSS

Question

I'm a 1-2 man band at work, and so far I've been using VSS for two reasons 1) the company was using that when I started a few months ago, and 2) it is friendly with Visual Studio.

Needless to say, I would very much like to upgrade to a not-so-archaic source control system. However, I don't want to give up the friendliness with Visual Studio, and I'd like to be able to migrate the existing codebase over to a better source control system.

I can't imagine I'm the only person in this situation. Does anyone have a success story they wouldn't mind sharing?

Answer 1

If you can pay for it, Source Gear Vault is designed to be a drop-in replacement.

If you can't pay, Subversion with AnkhSVN works well but is a bit different.

Answer 2

Consider Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) and the Tortoise shell extension (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/).

Answer 3

I'd recommend looking into Subversion or GIT if you need cheap or a free solution. There are some third party plugins like Visual Svn for Subversion to keep you in Visual Studio. If you want something that's close to home (VSS) then try Microsoft's Team System or Source Vault from SourceGear.

Answer 4

You can't beat the easy install of the free Visual SVN Server and the VisualSVN plug-in is well worth the money. I paid for that part out of my own pocket.

Answer 5

Another vote for Vault from SourceGear we moved from VSS to Vault about 7 months ago.

It was a very easy move and we have had a very good experience with Vault.

The little support we have needed was prompt and helpful.

Answer 6

We're using Subversion 1.5, TortoiseSVN, and for Visual Studio integration, PushOk's SVN plugin. The plugin isn't free, but it's affordable and reliable.

Answer 7

For one or two users, perforce is free as well. Once you need more that two users though, you have to start paying for it. They have a SCC plugin as well to allow integration into Visual Studio (and any other program that supports that interface).

Answer 8

We migrated from VSS to SVN very easily. TortoiseSVN, in the Win32 environment, integrates well with Explorer.

To setup your server. I would recommend a mirrored raid setup with Ubuntu Server installed. Once you have this running, set up apache and svn to host the repository from the raid. For a small team like yours, you can just throw together an old PC with a few spare IDE ports for the raid drives. High capacity IDE drives are fairly affordable these days.

Raid Howto: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Raid

Svn Howto: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/subversion.html

I would estimate a day of effort to setup.

Answer 9

The hardest part is going to be keeping your change history intact. I had to do this a couple of years ago. There was a lot of trial and error involved in the process.

I don't know if migration tools have gotten any better. Google for "sourcesafe svn migration". Once you're over that part, the rest is easy.

Answer 10

If you are currently familiar with VSS, but want something more featureful, you should probably have a look at Visual Studio Team System. It does require a server, but you can get a "Action Pack" from MS that includes all the licencies that you need for "Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition" from the Partner centre.

With this you wilkl get Bug, Risk and Issue tracking as well as many other features :)

Answer 11

We are using Subversion with TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. Works very well. If you only want to work on an internal network you don't need VisualSVN. Just install the Subversion server as a Windows Service.

Regarding the problem of keeping old revision history.

It may make sense to keep the VSS database. Just because you don't want to continue using VSS doesn't mean you have to get rid of it alltogether.

So if it is hard to find an easy migration path, why not keep the VSS database as a historical reference and then move all new development to Subversion.