Comment by BobbyTables2
3 days ago
I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe…
They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…
3 days ago
I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe…
They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…
I doubt most teams ever used it.
I spent a couple years at Microsoft and our team used Source Depot because a lot of people thought that our products were special and even Microsoft's own source control (TFS at the time) wasn't good enough.
I had used TFS at a previous job and didn't like it much, but I really missed it after having to use Source Depot.
I was surprised that TFS was not mentioned in the story (at least not as far as I have read).
It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.
SLM (aka slime, shared file-system source code control system) was used in most of MS, aka systems & apps.
NT created (well not NT itself, IIRC, there was some an MS-internal developer tools group in charge)/moved to source depot since a shared file-system doesn't scale well to thousands of users. Especially if some file gets locked and you DoS the whole division.
Source depot became the SCCS of choice (outside of Dev Division).
Then git took over, and MS had to scale git to NT-size scale, and upstream many of the changes to git mainline.
Raymond Chen has a blog that mentions much of this - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
TFS was used heavily by DevDiv, but as far as I know they never got perf to the point where Windows folk were satisfied with it on their monorepo.
It wasn't too bad for a centralized source control system tbh. Felt a lot like SVN reimagined through the prism of Microsoft's infamous NIH syndrome. I'm honestly not sure why anyone would use it over SVN unless you wanted their deep integration with Visual Studio.
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USGEO used it in the late 90s, as well as RAID
I don't know that they ever used it internally, certainly not for anything major. If they had, they probably wouldn't have sold it as it was...
Can't explain TFS though, that was still garbage internally and externally.
Around 2000? The only project I ever knew that used it was .NET and that was on SD by around then.
I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.
We used it. We knew no better. It was different then, you might not hear about alternatives unless you went looking for them. Source Safe was integrated with Visual Studio so was an obvious choice for small teams.
Get this; if you wanted to change a file you had to check it out. It was then locked and no-one else could change it. Files were literally read only on your machine unless you checked them out. The 'one at a time please' approach to Source Control (the other approach being 'lets figure out how to merge this later')
Which is exactly how CVS (and its predecessors RCS and SCCS) worked.
They were file based revision control, not repository based.
SVN added folders like trunk/branches/tags that overlaid the file based versioning by basically creating copies of the files under each folder.
Which is why branch creation/merging was such a complicated process, because if any of the files didn't merge, you had a half merged branch source and a half merged branch destination that you had to roll back.
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The file lock was a fun feature when a developer forgot to unlock it and went on holidays. Don't forget the black hole feature that made files randomly disappear for no reason. It may have been the worst piece of software I have ever used.
The lock approach is still used in IC design for some of the Cadence/Synopsis data files which are unmergable binaries. Not precisely sure of the details but I've heard it from other parts of the org.
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I remember a big commercial SCM at the time that had this as an option, when you wanted to make sure you wouldn’t need to merge. Can’t remember what it was called, you could “sync to file system” a bit like dropbox and it required teams of full time admins to build releases and cut branches and stuff . Think it was bought by IBM?
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Lucky you. Definitely one of the worst tools I’ve had the displeasure of working with. Made worse by people building on top of it for some insane reason.
I remember when we migrated from Visual Source Safe to TFS at my place of work. I was in charge of the migration and we hit errors and opened a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support. The ticket ended up being assigned to one of creators of Source Safe who replied "What you are seeing is not possible". He did manage to solve it in the end after a lot of head scratching.
It was at least a little better than CVS, but with SVN available at the same time, never understood the mentality of the offices that I worked at using Source Safe instead of SVN.
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Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system.
It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe.
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It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.