What are VSSVER.SCC files, and can I delete them?

Question

I've inherited a ASP.Net 2.0 (File System) Web Project from a client, where a few different companies have worked on this project in recent years. The project has been handed from one company to the next, before finally ending up with me.

So now, as you can imagine, the code base and file and folder structure has become pretty messy and ugly, and I am trying to fix this up.

It was handed over to me as an SVN exported repository/folder, which I then added to my own SVN repository. However, I am now finding a whole of vssver.scc scattered around. They don't seem to be used anywhere.

I believe these are used by another source control system other then SVN.

Can I delete these files?

Answer 1

Those are files used by MS Visual SourceSafe (VSS).

It might not be a good idea to simply remove the files, because the project files of your solution/code might still have some bindings to these files.

I suggest you simply make a backup of the vssver.scc files and remove them. If anything breaks, you can simply restore the files.

Answer 2

The files are part of the Visual SourceSafe binding mechanism. The files that are safe to delete are:

• *.scc
• *.vssscc
• *.vspscc

In addition to deleting the above files I would remove the binding information on all project files (*.vbproj, *.csproj, etc.) by removing the following XML tags.

• SccProjectName
• SccLocalPath
• SccAuxPath
• SccProvider

And finally in the solution file (*.sln) remove the following section.

GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
    SccNumberOfProjects = 1
    SccLocalPath0 = .
    SccProjectUniqueName1 = ...
    SccProjectName1 = ...
    SccLocalPath1 = ...
EndGlobalSection