7 ms·

I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe… They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…

dshacker 1y ago
I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.
- masklinn 1y ago
  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.
  - moron4hire 1y ago
    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.
    - masklinn 1y ago
      > It was at least a little better than CVS Highly debatable. CVS has a horrendous UI, but didn’t have a tendency to corrupt itself at the drop of a hat and didn’t require locking files to edit them by default (and then require a repository admin to come in and unlock files when a colleague went on holidays with files checked out). Also didn’t require shared write access to an SMB share (one of the reasons it corrupted itself so regularly).
      - moron4hire 1y ago
        Uhh, CVS definitely regularly corrupted itself. I nearly lost my senior research thesis in undergrad because of it. The only thing that saved me was understanding professors and the fact that I could drive back home to my parents' house and get back to my review in 30 minutes, where I had a good copy of my code I could put on an Iomega Zip disk from my desktop instead of the corrupted copy we couldn't pull from CVS in the CS lab.
  - mickeyp 1y ago
    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.
    - masklinn 1y ago
      > Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. I still ‘member articles calling it a source destruction system. Good times. > It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe. There have always been alternatives. And even when you didn’t use anything, at least you knew what to expect. Files didn’t magically disappear from old tarballs.
  - TowerTall 1y ago
    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.
- codeulike 1y ago
  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')
  - namdnay 1y ago
    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?
    - robin_reala 1y ago
      I guess you’re talking about Rational Rose? I had the misfortune of using that at my first industry job (fintech in 2004).
      - meepmorp 1y ago
        Rose is a UML modeling tool
        robin_reala 1y ago
        Oops, it was ClearCase that was Rational’s SCM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase
    - becurious 1y ago
      ClearCase?
  - rswail 1y ago
- qingcharles 1y ago
  It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.
pianoben 1y ago
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.
RandallBrown 1y ago
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.
- RyJones 1y ago
  USGEO used it in the late 90s, as well as RAID
- jbergens 1y ago
  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.
  - canucker2016 1y ago
    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=97855 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
  - int_19h 1y ago
    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.
mattgrice 1y ago
Around 2000? The only project I ever knew that used it was .NET and that was on SD by around then.

dshacker 1y ago

I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.

masklinn 1y ago
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.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    > It was at least a little better than CVS Highly debatable. CVS has a horrendous UI, but didn’t have a tendency to corrupt itself at the drop of a hat and didn’t require locking files to edit them by default (and then require a repository admin to come in and unlock files when a colleague went on holidays with files checked out). Also didn’t require shared write access to an SMB share (one of the reasons it corrupted itself so regularly).
    - moron4hire 1y ago
      Uhh, CVS definitely regularly corrupted itself. I nearly lost my senior research thesis in undergrad because of it. The only thing that saved me was understanding professors and the fact that I could drive back home to my parents' house and get back to my review in 30 minutes, where I had a good copy of my code I could put on an Iomega Zip disk from my desktop instead of the corrupted copy we couldn't pull from CVS in the CS lab.
- mickeyp 1y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    > Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. I still ‘member articles calling it a source destruction system. Good times. > It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe. There have always been alternatives. And even when you didn’t use anything, at least you knew what to expect. Files didn’t magically disappear from old tarballs.
- TowerTall 1y ago
  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.
codeulike 1y ago
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')
- namdnay 1y ago
  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?
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    I guess you’re talking about Rational Rose? I had the misfortune of using that at my first industry job (fintech in 2004).
    - meepmorp 1y ago
      Rose is a UML modeling tool
      - robin_reala 1y ago
        Oops, it was ClearCase that was Rational’s SCM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase
  - becurious 1y ago
    ClearCase?
- rswail 1y ago
qingcharles 1y ago
It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.

pianoben 1y ago

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.

RandallBrown 1y ago

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.

RyJones 1y ago
USGEO used it in the late 90s, as well as RAID
jbergens 1y ago
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.
- canucker2016 1y ago
  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=97855 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
- int_19h 1y ago
  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.

mattgrice 1y ago

Around 2000? The only project I ever knew that used it was .NET and that was on SD by around then.