Apache Subversion vs. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

Subversion solves our software versioning problem by providing tools for conflict resolution when doing collaborative work on the same files and projects. We use it with TortoiseSVN and it works great for some of our projects with smaller teams. However, we have a need to make code reviews more and it is a little more difficult to do that in SVN, compared to Bitbucket and Git.

Incentivized

The only time I could recommend Microsoft Visual SourceSafe would be for a beginner who has a small amount of code that they would like to keep track of. This solution would not be recommended for an enterprise or any shop where you have multiple developers working on the same solution.

Incentivized

• Track and control concurrent versions of the same files.
• Has good support from many different software, including visualization, DevOps toolchain.
• Well documented and understood by developers as it has been around for a long time.

Incentivized

• avoid losing code
• versioning of previous projects
• saving versions on db

Incentivized

• Refactoring the layout of a respoitory--or a part of a repository--can be a bit painful, especially for users with workspaces associated with the affected part of the repository. Not sure what could be done to make that better, but it would be nice if something was possible.
• Folks coming from Git can have problems using Subversion. Again, not sure anything can (or should) be done to address that, but it is occasionally an issue.

Incentivized

• Becoming corrupt and having to be rebuild from a previous version.
• It can be extremely slow to check in & out of.
• Lost support several years ago from Microsoft.

While there are interesting alternatives, such a GIT, Subversion has been a breath of fresh air compared to its predecessors like CVS or Microsoft Source Safe (now called Team Foundation Server). Its ease of use and high adoption rate is going to keep me using this product for years to come.

Overall Microsoft Visual Source Safe is very easy to use. It is a simple application that does only one thing. It has the basic windows tree structure for listing projects and solutions. There is no way to search for a particular file, project or solution. There is also no way to search the code in the files.

Incentivized

There is no longer support for Visual SourceSafe as I believe it's been retired. There are, however, users that still use the tool and they do help if there are questions or complaints.

After Microsoft Visual SourceSafe was discontinued, we chose Subversion and it was a great choice. We were able to migrate to Apache Subversion very quickly and easily and benefited immediately from its non-locking workflow (SourceSafe required users to "lock" the file when editing to prevent editing conflicts from other users, whereas Subversion allows multiple users to edit the same file simultaneously and then merge conflicts later.)

While we still use Apache Subversion for our legacy projects, we've migrated to Git and GitHub for our new projects as that is the new "cool kid" and it provides some benefits such as distributed and offline development. But Git is more complex than Apache Subversion and not as easy to learn.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps is a much better, more modern tool that Visual SourceSafe and everyone should be moving to it. Most if not all the integration that is there can be done or emulated in it

• It allowed us to deliver the right files to our customer without "clobbering" previous releases, making for a far more satisfied customer.
• It allowed our developers to work on two releases in parallel (plus an occasional third, for emergency fixes).
• With some simple hooks, it allowed us to set up a system where code was was automatically deployed to test servers as soon as developers committed it, making testing easier. This was made easier by virtue of being a ColdFusion project, which requires no compilation. However, that is possible for compiled code with a continuous integration system like Jenkins.

Incentivized

• When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
• We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.

Incentivized