I know you miss my rantings, so here they are Web 2.0 style baby.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

A new name!

Okay, so at Tudor's suggestion I have renamed my blog... The "The adjective plural-noun" formula apparently no good.

So instead how about my most frequently uttered phrase at work?

Today what I really hate is VISUAL SOURCE SAFE. ARGH! What a huge pile of steaming poo. And what's worse, the people who use it are rarely prepared to change to something else until way way too late (ie. the database corrupts, or as is the case at work right now-- it's effing useless over a WAN).
Of course, by that time their processes are totally entrenched in the SourceSafe model and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who understands the concept of branching or merging. And OMG what's this about "concurrent" working models?

Anyways, the main problem we're seeing is a combination of stupidities where we _need_ to use Visual Studio to pull down the project out of SourceSafe since it has web projects within it that it needs to create. And part way through it just freaks out and stops downloading from the repository. And apparently there is no way to fix this, and the only way we can get the code is to go locally to Fredericton and get it there. VSS is NOT designed to work over a WAN, as it basically treats the repository as a local filesystem (it just happens to be on a network share, I guess it assumes) and opens files left, right and center. Pretty inefficient.

However, I _am_ able to get all the code when I just use the standalone client. But I can't open up the solution because it contains web projects, and for some reason it _has_ to go to sourcesafe to get those. ARGH! This is why people should NOT program via Wizards.

So, long story short, I am investigating two options. One is a client/server app called SourceOffSite that essentially is a proxy for VSS. The server runs on the LAN, and is a VSS client. The client runs on your machine (integrates with VisualStudio) and basically is a proper client/server protocol that is clean and mean. The messy shit happens over on the server side which should be local to the VSS repository.

The other option is to change the Web projects into DLL projects so that they can be opened without any freaky Visual Studio integration to the IIS web server. It means you have an extra step of set up initially (import the Web applications into the IIS configuration metabase) but damn, at least you can use a standalone client!

So, I promise I won't talk always about what I hate. But it'll most likely come up frequently. :)

Hope y'all are doing well out there on other coast. I miss all you guys!

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gee, you're making me all nostalgic for VSS and VS.NET.
For a short-term reduction in pain, try just deleting the .csproj files from the web project folders before you open them the first time. Then VS.NET doesn't freak out, and it only has to retrieve one file from VSS.
When we wrote a NANT script to do a clean build from the repository, the last step was to go through and delete all those .csproj files so the developer could actually open the solutions.
Can't you convince the team to try subversion?

1:47 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aw, I miss the Greg-rants! Course, I didn't really follow what you were complaining about in this case, but still..

Jess

9:51 PM

 
Blogger Shawn said...

You could just use the VSS 2005 Beta! Apparently it’s more stable than any other VSS release ... like that would be hard to do :)

1:40 AM

 

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