At this week's Triangle .NET Users Group, Microsoft's Doug Neumann gave a presentation on Visual Studio 2005 Team System, which looks great. What wasn't so great, however, was the related news that Doug delivered: Whidbey will ship with a "new" version of crusty old Visual SourceSafe. There will be some new features, as outlined in Korby Parnell's blog:
Hear, hear! However, not including the Team System may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. The entire SCC API is stuck in SourceSafe’s model, which make it incredible hard to integrate version control systems that support edit-merge-checkin, such as CVS, Subversion, Perforce and Vault. Frankly, the entire build system is version control unfriendly. I think Makefiles and the command line would be just as productive.
I laugh at VSS. I looked at it when I was playing around with VS.NET 2003 and decided against touching it. The UI is still very much Windows 95ish and probably hasn’t been touched since then. I’m not running apps that look like they belong in Windows 3.1, no matter how functional they are. Chances are I can find one with a better UI that performs many of the same functions.
I think VSS will die out shortly, but Microsoft seems to think VSS IS Team System “lite”. VSS is Team System built 10 years ago that is collecting dust in someone elses CVS repository. Lord knows they probably don’t put the VSS code in a VSS store.
It’s very annoying but at least we can use our own version control systems if we wish. I think it stinks about the Express line but that just means there’s no integrated add-ins for your particular version control system. You can still work on it, but it’ll be disconnected. Go efficiency!
Blah. I agree with everything you say basically. SmileNod
Team System appears, at least in theory, to be third-party tool friendly… this was brought up by Doug at several points in the presentation! They seem to be planning for third party plugins, unlike VSS…