Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued) Reviews & Insights

Visual SourceSafe was a great tool for its time, but it has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Our organization still has code that is still stored in it from a legacy perspective, so we still have to use it from time to time. We hope every day that it does not corrupt when we open it up.

I would not recommend Visual SourceSafe to anyone out there as there are so many better, more modern solutions that do what it does and much more. Visual SourceSafe should be retired in most cases.

Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is still used across the organization. We are in the process of trying to migrate off this platform as well as off of Microsoft Team Foundation Server. We are migrating towards Azure DevOps. Visual SourceSafe has reached its end of life and we have experienced many issues.

The only time I could recommend Microsoft Visual SourceSafe would be for a beginner who has a small amount of code that they would like to keep track of. This solution would not be recommended for an enterprise or any shop where you have multiple developers working on the same solution.

We are still using Visual SourceSafe for a few software projects that weren't yet migrated to SVN or Git. At the time when these projects were started (many years ago), VSS was pretty much the best available option on the market for versioning of our source code. It allowed us to keep it stored on a server and not on the local development system and to allow more people to work on the same project.

I am not recommending Visual SourceSafe since this is a very old product and discontinued by Microsoft. Basic functionalities that a source control program should have are missing from VSS: collaborative work on the same files, branching, file merging, blame file etc.

There are other tools out there that are much better for these and also free.

In my organization, Visual Source Safe is mainly used to correctly manage the versioning of the various development files in Visual Studio. Since I use this product I can always have the correct versioning of the files, avoiding the loss of the code and analyzing the changes made by checking the previous versions.

Specific scenarios where this product works well are when: managing a large number of projects and you develop purely through visual studio, amount of the budget to evaluate similar but much more expensive products is not high, your company has developers that need a source code control and if you develop daily with a high frequency.