VSS 2005

I
was right!  I just learned that I was right by reading the Product
Roadmap for VSS. 

What I am so happy about is that the roadmap reports the following:

Automate Your Team Processes.

Use events, such as OnBeforeCheckout or OnAfterCheckIn to
automate your process. Leverage the new MSBuild tool by creating custom tasks that
retrieve and download source code files before building them with an automated build.

Get it?  This enables us to build a continuous integration system
entirely on the .NET Programmable Interop Assemblies (PIA) for Visual SourceSafe thereby
doing away with CruiseControl.Net. 
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly dislike Cruise Control, but how much nicer
would it be to fire your builds from an event model tied to the source control system
than to poll for changes?

While this is exciting, it may be moot.  The jury is still out
on whether or not we will ever need VSS again because of the following:

In addition to this new release of Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft has
also announced the Visual
Studio Team Foundation suite of software configuration management
and enterprise software development life-cycle technologies. This new suite was created
to assist teams in managing sophisticated processes and comprehensive relational project
metadata tracking. The suite includes work item tracking, build management, project
management, and cross-system reporting. Also as a part of this suite, Microsoft has
developed a new source control system from the ground up to integrate deeply and seamlessly
with the rest of the Team Foundation suite, as well as integrate deeply with Active
Directory user permissions, SQL Server security, and Windows SharePoint Services.