INFO: Visual SourceSafe Project Oriented Version Control

SourceSafe is a project-oriented version control system. It does not write your code for you, but takes care of the maintenance and tracking responsibilities, freeing you to concentrate on programming.

Using SourceSafe, you can enhance your development productivity by enabling you to coordinate team programming efforts, track file and project histories, share code, and provide a single data source across multiple platforms.

Team Coordination

In SourceSafe, users check out files when they want to make modifications to them. All other users can see who has a file checked out and when it was checked out. When the developer is finished modifying a program, he or she can update SourceSafe to make the changes viewable to everyone.

File and Project Histories

Version control is the ability to obtain current and recent versions of files. SourceSafe uses Reverse Delta technology to store only the latest version of a file, with the information to re-create older versions of the file when needed.

SourceSafe also tracks the history of the project, allowing you to label a project when you have reached a certain level of development (for example, version 3.05.234). Later on, you can refer back to the files in the project as they existed at the time you labeled the project.

Shared Code

You can share a file or files between several projects. Unlike having the same file in several directories on a hard drive, sharing files in SourceSafe places them equally in all projects. Any changes made in one project will be reflected in all projects where the file is shared.

Multi-Platform Support

SourceSafe can share a common data location across many platforms. It is currently available for the Windows, Windows NT, MS-DOS, Unix, and Macintosh platforms. It will also keep track of both short and long filenames, using the appropriate name for the file system you are currently using. Visual SourceSafe 4.0 is available for the Windows, Windows NT, Windows 95 and MS-DOS platforms. Visual SourceSafe version 5.0 and 6.0 are 32-bit only, running on Windows NT and Windows 95.

There are many additional features in SourceSafe. The Microsoft SourceSafe Concepts and Configuration Manual gives an overview of these and other features in greater detail.

For additional information on Visual SourceSafe features, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: