Customer Reviews

Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice: Best practice management and development of Visual Studio .NET 2005 applications with this easy-to-use SCM tool from Microsoft

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As far as books about Visual SourceSafe go, there aren't many to choose from, and the software itself didn't get updated for the longest time. Imagine my surprise, then, when I get this and it's not only a simple coverage of VSS, but it's also an excellent technology book in general! And I don't say that because the writing is clear, not dry and boring, even though that is true. I say that because of the fair and seemingly unbiased way that the author treats source/version control in general and how the approach of VSS fits into that. Rarely do I see technology books assess technologies without subtly vilifying or sugar-coating them, it was a nice shock to see such even-handedness here.

So if you're new to source control and you're in the Windows world of development, pick this up to learn the basics and a piece of software you can branch out from. If you're stuck being a VSS administrator and you need a reference, there's another reason to get this. And lastly, if you didn't know there was a 2005 version of VSS, this will provide a nice, in depth explanation of the new XML Web Service and remoting features.

Why aren't there more books on SourceSafe? Moreover, why is SourceSafe so anti-intuitive? I realize it has seamless integration with Visual Studio, but actually setting up projects in it is a painful process, and forking code and merging branches isn't that easy either.

This book does explain how to do these things, but it isn't written very well. There are a ton of screenshots that let you easily follow the author through some examples, but a lot of them could have been excluded. With a good editor, this book could be trimmed down to about 100 pages of real meat. The author goes into too much detail about the 43 different ways to do something, when really they are all extremely similar or he is going to introduce the way you should really do it at the last of the chapter.

One crucial topic the book left out was how to add stored procedures to SourceSafe. That is one of the most attractive things about it, and it was left out completely.

But, there isn't a better book out there that I know about ... so what can you do? It is better than the built-in help in SourceSafe, so it was probably worth the money for me and earned a spot on the bookshelf. But it wouldn't take much for someone to through together a better book, not to mention better software.

[...]

This book is an excellent introduction to the issues in software configuration managment in general and Visual SourceSave in particular. Well written, accessible, and logically laid out.