Using sourcesafe for source control risky?

[stoymigo]

Have you had a bad experience when using source safe as a source control tool, we currently using it with vb6.
Reason I ask is because it's been said that one shouldn't use it.

 

[death192]

Hi Stoymigo

Look SSafe was a Good SC tool back in the Day , i myself used it for a long time , for vb6 , c# and vb.net code.

i have since migrated most of my work to TFS and i haven't looked back.

there are also some open source solution out there that do a Great Job and i have tried them and was very happy with the "Free" aspect but they do lack the "Support" if you will.

but yea SSafe isn't bad , its just the Bad practice of using out dated Software.
"my 5c"

 

[Ancalagon]

Compared to newer source versioning systems, visual source safe is terribly outdated. Just move to subversion and be done with it - its easy to use, widely understood and supported on just about every platform out there. And it integrates with visual studio. And its easy to diff and merge across branches and even repositories I think.

Why are you still using vb6?

 

[stoymigo]

Compared to newer source versioning systems, visual source safe is terribly outdated. Just move to subversion and be done with it - its easy to use, widely understood and supported on just about every platform out there. And it integrates with visual studio. And its easy to diff and merge across branches and even repositories I think.

Why are you still using vb6?

Because the program I work on was originally made in vb6, it makes lots of money for the business, and the boss won't bother on trying to convert it to .net.

 

[biometrics]

Why are you still using vb6?

VB6 is still widely used.

 

[guest2013-1]

Because the program I work on was originally made in vb6, it makes lots of money for the business, and the boss won't bother on trying to convert it to .net.

If it makes so much money, you'd definitely be better off converting it, especially considering that you need a senior programmer to be able to maintain it if need be (at least 10+ years) since VB6 hasn't been taught since 2000 if I'm not mistaken

 

[Ancalagon]

Eish source control is the least of your problems then!

 

[Kosmik]

Hi Stoymigo

Look SSafe was a Good SC tool back in the Day , i myself used it for a long time , for vb6 , c# and vb.net code.

i have since migrated most of my work to TFS and i haven't looked back.

there are also some open source solution out there that do a Great Job and i have tried them and was very happy with the "Free" aspect but they do lack the "Support" if you will.

but yea SSafe isn't bad , its just the Bad practice of using out dated Software.
"my 5c"

+1

A big issue I had with it, was that it was essentially a text database. I felt much more comfortable moving our code to TFS and with the current licensing, it's actually free.

TBH , we never had any crashes etc though.

 

[death192]

Because the program I work on was originally made in vb6, it makes lots of money for the business, and the boss won't bother on trying to convert it to .net.

I know the feeling , one of our most critical applications in my work environment is also a vb6 app , but since i was put in charge of its "evolution", i have spent quite a bit of time in converting it as it so critical to business it cant stay on the vb6 platform it needs to move to c# ( well at least my preference) .

believe me , if its as critical to the BU as you say , all attempts should be made to upgrade to a the latest .net to ensure the longevity of the application as-well as to ensure future enhancements can be made to the application with minimal regression to vb6.

 

[death192]

+1

A big issue I had with it, was that it was essentially a text database. I felt much more comfortable moving our code to TFS and with the current licensing, it's actually free.

TBH , we never had any crashes etc though.

My sentiments exactly , if you didn't messed with it , it never messed with your code. LoL

 

[zippy]

If it makes so much money, you'd definitely be better off converting it, especially considering that you need a senior programmer to be able to maintain it if need be (at least 10+ years) since VB6 hasn't been taught since 2000 if I'm not mistaken

It's not up to him.

 

[guest2013-1]

It's not up to him.

I know, but it's up to him to recommend it to his superiors who has the power to decide to upgrade it or not. For example rolling out updates. DLL-hell. etc can save a crap load of time, plus they then have the option of any developer they hire (or decide to hire) to know WTF is going on and pay him a cheap-ass salary.

It's all good and well sitting and just doing what you're told. But there must be some kind of "push" from a developer to outline the benefits of such a move as opposed to the time/cost it will take.

For example, we've been doing financial reports on 3 different systems, they've now chosen to move all of those reports to 1 platform and decided to outsource this instead of having the in-house team do it because the outsourced company has the skill to do it quite quickly without any issue.

This will save 20 work days a month in JUST reporting (we have several financial managers)

That's 1 month of someone sitting doing JUST reporting. No idea what they pay a financial manager, but being able to save that amount of time is quite significant and justifies the cost for the outsource.

And it's something that was suggested, not by a manager, but a lonely old programmer gatvol of doing reports and the inconsistency between data/reports and giving support on that crap

 

[stoymigo]

<snip>

Makes sense.
The product is being moved to .net, but a web based version. However the desktop version is the real money maker, we'll only move it to .net when microsoft releases an os that doesn't support vb6.

 

[Hamster]

Compared to newer source versioning systems, visual source safe is terribly outdated. Just move to subversion and be done with it - its easy to use, widely understood and supported on just about every platform out there. And it integrates with visual studio. And its easy to diff and merge across branches and even repositories I think.

Why are you still using vb6?

So move from one outdated SCS to another?

He should look at Mercurial or Git.

 

[_kabal_]

Svn is absolutely still relevant. Git is not better than svn. Neither is svn better than git. There are advantages to both, and each does things better than the other. Moving a large team to git will be a steeper learning curve, with lots of "unpushed" commits. An svn move would be much simpler, due to existing familiarity with SS, while immediately adding its benefits like far superior merge tracking.
Not every company wants or needs decentralized source control

I prefer to use git personally

 

[Hamster]

Svn is absolutely still relevant. Git is not better than svn. Neither is svn better than git. There are advantages to both, and each does things better than the other. Moving a large team to git will be a steeper learning curve, with lots of "unpushed" commits. An svn move would be much simpler, due to existing familiarity with SS, while immediately adding its benefits like far superior merge tracking.
Not every company wants or needs decentralized source control

I prefer to use git personally

I moved our large dev team (60+ devs) over to Hg from SVN. It's a different concept and the learning curve is a bit steep. But they all grasped it pretty quick. Hg makes a lot of things easier especially large cross branch merges and also doesn't "pollute" the code base with hundreds of .svn directories.

After Hg, using SVN again feels like a downgrade (personal opinion).

There is one thing/side effect of using Hg that is a pain in the ass - repo size. Were are a large team and the repo's size on disk grew quite a bit. Also, figuring out a way to get people to use rebase etc. but once we got past the pain, the pros outweigh the cons.


It's not perfect though. Far from it. But it really get's the job done.

/waits for next ben scs