6 ms·

I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.

masklinn 1y ago
Lucky you. Definitely one of the worst tools I’ve had the displeasure of working with. Made worse by people building on top of it for some insane reason.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  It was at least a little better than CVS, but with SVN available at the same time, never understood the mentality of the offices that I worked at using Source Safe instead of SVN.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    > It was at least a little better than CVS Highly debatable. CVS has a horrendous UI, but didn’t have a tendency to corrupt itself at the drop of a hat and didn’t require locking files to edit them by default (and then require a repository admin to come in and unlock files when a colleague went on holidays with files checked out). Also didn’t require shared write access to an SMB share (one of the reasons it corrupted itself so regularly).
    - moron4hire 1y ago
      Uhh, CVS definitely regularly corrupted itself. I nearly lost my senior research thesis in undergrad because of it. The only thing that saved me was understanding professors and the fact that I could drive back home to my parents' house and get back to my review in 30 minutes, where I had a good copy of my code I could put on an Iomega Zip disk from my desktop instead of the corrupted copy we couldn't pull from CVS in the CS lab.
- mickeyp 1y ago
  Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    > Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. I still ‘member articles calling it a source destruction system. Good times. > It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe. There have always been alternatives. And even when you didn’t use anything, at least you knew what to expect. Files didn’t magically disappear from old tarballs.
- TowerTall 1y ago
  I remember when we migrated from Visual Source Safe to TFS at my place of work. I was in charge of the migration and we hit errors and opened a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support. The ticket ended up being assigned to one of creators of Source Safe who replied "What you are seeing is not possible". He did manage to solve it in the end after a lot of head scratching.
codeulike 1y ago
We used it. We knew no better. It was different then, you might not hear about alternatives unless you went looking for them. Source Safe was integrated with Visual Studio so was an obvious choice for small teams. Get this; if you wanted to change a file you had to check it out. It was then locked and no-one else could change it. Files were literally read only on your machine unless you checked them out. The 'one at a time please' approach to Source Control (the other approach being 'lets figure out how to merge this later')
- namdnay 1y ago
  I remember a big commercial SCM at the time that had this as an option, when you wanted to make sure you wouldn’t need to merge. Can’t remember what it was called, you could “sync to file system” a bit like dropbox and it required teams of full time admins to build releases and cut branches and stuff . Think it was bought by IBM?
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    I guess you’re talking about Rational Rose? I had the misfortune of using that at my first industry job (fintech in 2004).
    - meepmorp 1y ago
      Rose is a UML modeling tool
      - robin_reala 1y ago
        Oops, it was ClearCase that was Rational’s SCM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase
  - becurious 1y ago
    ClearCase?
- rswail 1y ago
qingcharles 1y ago
It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.

Lucky you. Definitely one of the worst tools I’ve had the displeasure of working with. Made worse by people building on top of it for some insane reason.

moron4hire 1y ago
It was at least a little better than CVS, but with SVN available at the same time, never understood the mentality of the offices that I worked at using Source Safe instead of SVN.
- masklinn 1y ago
  > It was at least a little better than CVS Highly debatable. CVS has a horrendous UI, but didn’t have a tendency to corrupt itself at the drop of a hat and didn’t require locking files to edit them by default (and then require a repository admin to come in and unlock files when a colleague went on holidays with files checked out). Also didn’t require shared write access to an SMB share (one of the reasons it corrupted itself so regularly).
  - moron4hire 1y ago
    Uhh, CVS definitely regularly corrupted itself. I nearly lost my senior research thesis in undergrad because of it. The only thing that saved me was understanding professors and the fact that I could drive back home to my parents' house and get back to my review in 30 minutes, where I had a good copy of my code I could put on an Iomega Zip disk from my desktop instead of the corrupted copy we couldn't pull from CVS in the CS lab.
mickeyp 1y ago
Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe.
- masklinn 1y ago
  > Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system. I still ‘member articles calling it a source destruction system. Good times. > It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe. There have always been alternatives. And even when you didn’t use anything, at least you knew what to expect. Files didn’t magically disappear from old tarballs.
TowerTall 1y ago
I remember when we migrated from Visual Source Safe to TFS at my place of work. I was in charge of the migration and we hit errors and opened a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support. The ticket ended up being assigned to one of creators of Source Safe who replied "What you are seeing is not possible". He did manage to solve it in the end after a lot of head scratching.

codeulike 1y ago

We used it. We knew no better. It was different then, you might not hear about alternatives unless you went looking for them. Source Safe was integrated with Visual Studio so was an obvious choice for small teams. Get this; if you wanted to change a file you had to check it out. It was then locked and no-one else could change it. Files were literally read only on your machine unless you checked them out. The 'one at a time please' approach to Source Control (the other approach being 'lets figure out how to merge this later')

namdnay 1y ago
I remember a big commercial SCM at the time that had this as an option, when you wanted to make sure you wouldn’t need to merge. Can’t remember what it was called, you could “sync to file system” a bit like dropbox and it required teams of full time admins to build releases and cut branches and stuff . Think it was bought by IBM?
- robin_reala 1y ago
  I guess you’re talking about Rational Rose? I had the misfortune of using that at my first industry job (fintech in 2004).
  - meepmorp 1y ago
    Rose is a UML modeling tool
    - robin_reala 1y ago
      Oops, it was ClearCase that was Rational’s SCM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase
- becurious 1y ago
  ClearCase?
rswail 1y ago

qingcharles 1y ago

It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.