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Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

Score1 out of 10

8 Reviews and Ratings

What is Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)?

Visual SourceSafe is a discontinued source control software offering, from Microsoft.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued).
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VSS for enterprise

Incentivized
Kyle KochtanView profile
Technical Lead in Information Technology at Newell Rubbermaid (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • At this point in its lifecycle there are not many things VSS does well
  • Its main strength would be its ability to be self contained on a local drive
  • It is a basic Code repository

Cons

  • VSS is prone to corruption causing the DB to have to be rebuilt
  • It does not perform well if you have a lot of code in it it will be very slow
  • No searching basic tree structure

Return on Investment

  • There were many benefits years ago when this product first came out
  • Now there is only risk for an enterprise
  • The corrupted DB issues have cost hundreds of man hours to correct

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), Apache Subversion and GitHub

Other Software Used

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), GitHub, Apache Subversion

Visual SourceSafe - An outdated product

Incentivized
Cristian BodnarasecView profile
Senior Software Development Manager in Information Technology at eSilicon (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The integration with Visual Studio is its best asset for developers using Visual Studio for software development.
  • File versioning - creates file versions with notes.
  • Ability to add tags to create a project version.
  • Ease of administration.

Cons

  • The system stability could be improved. Often we get file corrupted errors.
  • The User Interface is not modern and not user-friendly.
  • Concurrent check-outs could be added, allowing more people to work on the same file at the same time.
  • Add conflict resolution, files comparison, blame file, features that any modern source control program should have.

Return on Investment

  • When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
  • We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.

Alternatives Considered

Git and Bitbucket

A Good Source Control

Incentivized
Luca CampanelliView profile
Senior Betting & Online DB Administrator in Information Technology at Intralot Italia S.p.A.- Gamenet Group (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • avoid losing code
  • versioning of previous projects
  • saving versions on db

Cons

  • sometimes there are problems with check-in and checkout if done simultaneously
  • the user interface is not really nice
  • only source control

Return on Investment

  • gains in avoiding loss of code
  • gains in terms of hours spent on development
  • gains in terms of time saved

Alternatives Considered

Team Foundation Server

Legacy source control

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • It has outlived most of the competition out there.
  • It's good at maintaining exclusive locks.
  • It's good at being kept on a network share.

Cons

  • Becoming corrupt and having to be rebuild from a previous version.
  • It can be extremely slow to check in & out of.
  • Lost support several years ago from Microsoft.

Return on Investment

  • We've lost a lot of hours rebuilding our solution based on lost work/corrupted files.
  • Only having a single person work on a single file has killed performance
  • No CI/CI capabilities and had to find other ways to do the process.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS)

Other Software Used

Azure API Management, Azure Bot Service, Azure Logic Apps