VSS 2005 Part II

Well, it doesn’t exactly suck, but it isn’t the killer app I was wanting it to be.

One of the biggest promises of VSS 2005 was the ability to function over HTTP. 
I understand that this will work, but only if you are running the client
embedded within Visual Studio.  In other words, you must be integrated into the
development environment to run over HTTP which means that you can’t use it to manage
your Perl or Python or Java or whatever. Lame.  At the very least this
functionality should be in the VSS client itself on rev one.  Heck, I would propose
that it matters more there than in the IDE.

Second, the 2 working modes for VSS are basically “multi-checkout” and
“locking checkout”.  I was praying for the passive working mode that
is used by and
SubVersion and others.

The VSS client does run a lot faster over a VPN from my house than the old
one did, but is that really all that impressive?  Come on, guys.  You can
do better than this.  Given the hatred for prior versions of VSS, you would think
that Microsoft would
want to blow us away with this new one.  Oh well. 

Maybe the source control system within Team System will turn out to be better. 
MS does tell us that VSS is only intended for small scale projects and that we should
be using Team System for bigger projects.  I guess there is no better way
to ensure that up-sell than to make VSS still a pain in the a$$.

So what am I going to do?   Well, Matt is
letting me into his SubVersion system that he is hosting at home and I will try that
for awhile.  I have never used it before, but if feels a lot like CVS over HTTP
so far. Cool.

Links

• CVS

• SubVersion

• Tortoise SVN – Windows Client for
  SubVersion

• VSS
  2005