How to manage versions with Visual SourceSafe?

Question

Hello, My team is working with VSS and we are having difficulties managing versions:

We want to take a "snapshot" of the project we're working on, so we can keep working on it, but when we need to - we can get the files of the snapshot and built them for a release. (Is that called branching?)

Alternatively, getting all project files by date would be great too. (Meaning I would get the last checked-in version of each file in the project prior to the specified date.)

Is there any tutorial regarding this? I searched the net a bit and only found very simple howto's.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can apply a label to a current snapshot of source safe (like BUILD1) and then get the tree based on that label at a later date.

Answer 2

As Cannonade wrote, a label might be what you want. But since you explicitly mentioned branching in your question, you should be aware of the differences between a label and a branch:

With a label, you simply mark the current state of all files in your source safe database (the repository). If you created a label "V1.0", you can now at any time easily retrieve exactly that state and rebuild the V1.0 release for example.

With a branch, you create a copy of the current state of your repository. E.g. if you create a copy named "1.0", you can then continue with the development e.g. towards V2.0. Should you ever need to fix a bug for V1.0, then you can do this on the "1.0" branch.

So branches should be used to work on different versions of your projects in parallel. Labels should then be used to mark special versions on your branches (e.g. the ones used to create a release).

One last note: SourceSafe does not have a specific "branch" command. Instead you "Share" your solution and select the option "Branch after share". You can find more information about it in MSDN.

And a very last note: We stopped using SourceSafe about 1.5 years ago and switched to subversion (which is opensource and free). Have a look at subversion or other solutions. I can not imagine ever going back to SourceSafe.