In my company, we use SourceSafe and Visual studio. Starting up a minor project, I am eager to try a more modern source control, I am aiming at Subversion. But I need to work with the previous projects in SourceSafe, at least for now.
Q: Will it work well to use both SourceSafe and Subversion in the visual studio IDE? Using what? And are there things in Subversion I may feel painful if I am used to SourceSafe?
Regarding your first question, I don't know of anything that would stop the two working side by side. You can try Ankh for a free SVN VS add-in, or VisualSVN is a commercial option.
Regarding your second question, SVN has a different model than SourceSafe. SourceSafe requires checkout (pessimistic) whereas SVN you just change your files and commit when ready (optimistic). Any conflicts will need to be merged. Other things differ as well, and you should definitely read basic SVN documentation before you start using it. TortoiseSVN provides both excellent Windows shell integration and good doco too.
HTH, Kent
PS. Once you try SVN in earnest, you will never look back to SourceSafe.
In Visual Studio Tools | Options you can select the source control provider from in there. We used to swap between VSS and another provider some years back and all we had to do was change this when we loaded to project.
If you're using SVN, I would highly recommend looking at VisualSVN for integration in Visual Studio. (Although read comments below...)
There shouldn't be a problem using Visual Source Safe and Subversion side by side. Visual Source Safe keys off .scc files within the folders. I also believe the source control is stored in the project files. In any event, Visual Studio automagically handles Visual Source Safe integration.
Subversion (TortiseSVN really) stores all it's metadata in .svn folders. When you install Ankh or VisualSVN, these programs target the .svn folders. If you load a project that has .svn folder anywhere in it's folder structure, Ankh or VisualSVN will kick in.
I agree with other posts, once you turn to Subversion you won't want to go back. It takes a little getting use to. Spend sometime, if don't know already, learning merging and branching. It will serve you will moving forward.
After you get subversion up and going, you might want to look into continuous integration. Cruise Control.Net would be a good tool to start.
Best of luck!
Using SVN technically, won't be an issue - especially with Tortoise +VisualSVN (latter not free but cheap).
The headspace change in going from the usual VSS way of working - pessimistic locking - to the SVN/rest of the world style - optimistic locking will be the harder hurdle.
To explain a little less concisely - if you are used to locking a file when you 'check it out' so noone else can change it, or at least everybody else knowing you are working on it before they try to make any modifications it is quite a leap to go over to not knowing until you try to commit - at which point you have to do merges.
Merging is the tricky bit sometimes, purely conceptually, but especially merges for Winforms with the designer auto-code and the resx files...
Think very carefully about your branching strategy. Best to start just working directly off of trunk to get used to the software before deciding to go for merging. You will find a lot of things quite repetitive and manual compared to VSS - we have a coupla guys here who admin the SVN servers and thay have been invaluable in writing scripts and add-ons for Tortoise to take some of the pain away...
I've used TortoiseSVN and SourceSafe in parallel with VC6/VB6 projects in order to keep a parallel log of changes with Subversion (for various reasons, but mainly for keeping proper track of revisions) until we were able/prepared to switch fully to Subversion. I had no problems, I only had to keep an eye for new files coming from the SourceSafe repository.
Working with Visual Studio .NET is a different ballgame if you install AkhSVN, which I did. I worked with it for a few months and ran into problems when AnkhSVN automatically kicked-in when opening SourceSafe-controlled projects. Just avoid mixed SVN/SourceSafe projects with VS.NET, or don't install AnkhSVN.