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VSS for enterprise
August 19, 2019

VSS for enterprise

Kyle Kochtan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Visual SourceSafe

Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is still used across the organization. We are in the process of trying to migrate off this platform as well as off of Microsoft Team Foundation Server. We are migrating towards Azure DevOps. Visual SourceSafe has reached its end of life and we have experienced many issues.
  • At this point in its lifecycle there are not many things VSS does well
  • Its main strength would be its ability to be self contained on a local drive
  • It is a basic Code repository
  • VSS is prone to corruption causing the DB to have to be rebuilt
  • It does not perform well if you have a lot of code in it it will be very slow
  • No searching basic tree structure
  • There were many benefits years ago when this product first came out
  • Now there is only risk for an enterprise
  • The corrupted DB issues have cost hundreds of man hours to correct
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.
It's a Microsoft product so the customer support is great. The program has been around a long time so there are plenty of places on line to get assistance. Also almost any development shop you go to will have at least one developer who has used this product extensively in their career.
We selected Microsoft Visual SourceSafe because at the time none of these other products were out there. Now we are trying to migrate all our legacy code from Visual SourceSafe to Azure DevOps. Unfortunately we don't have a value proposition for some of the older products so we are forced to leave them in place.
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.