Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued) Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8 out of 10

Score

8 out of 10

Reviews

4 Reviews

Legacy source control

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

August 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Visual SourceSafe was a great tool for its time, but it has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Our organization still has code that is still stored in it from a legacy perspective, so we still have to use it from time to time. We hope every day that it does not corrupt when we open it up.

Pros

It has outlived most of the competition out there.
It's good at maintaining exclusive locks.
It's good at being kept on a network share.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would not recommend Visual SourceSafe to anyone out there as there are so many better, more modern solutions that do what it does and much more. Visual SourceSafe should be retired in most cases.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

VSS for enterprise

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

August 19, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Kyle Kochtan

Technical Lead in Information Technology at Newell Rubbermaid (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Visual SourceSafe - An outdated product

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are still using Visual SourceSafe for a few software projects that weren't yet migrated to SVN or Git. At the time when these projects were started (many years ago), VSS was pretty much the best available option on the market for versioning of our source code. It allowed us to keep it stored on a server and not on the local development system and to allow more people to work on the same project.

Pros

The integration with Visual Studio is its best asset for developers using Visual Studio for software development.
File versioning - creates file versions with notes.
Ability to add tags to create a project version.
Ease of administration.

Cons

The system stability could be improved. Often we get file corrupted errors.
The User Interface is not modern and not user-friendly.
Concurrent check-outs could be added, allowing more people to work on the same file at the same time.
Add conflict resolution, files comparison, blame file, features that any modern source control program should have.

Likelihood to Recommend

I am not recommending Visual SourceSafe since this is a very old product and discontinued by Microsoft. Basic functionalities that a source control program should have are missing from VSS: collaborative work on the same files, branching, file merging, blame file etc.

There are other tools out there that are much better for these and also free.

Cristian Bodnarasec

Senior Software Development Manager in Information Technology at eSilicon (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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A Good Source Control

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my organization, Visual Source Safe is mainly used to correctly manage the versioning of the various development files in Visual Studio. Since I use this product I can always have the correct versioning of the files, avoiding the loss of the code and analyzing the changes made by checking the previous versions.

Pros

avoid losing code
versioning of previous projects
saving versions on db

Cons

sometimes there are problems with check-in and checkout if done simultaneously
the user interface is not really nice
only source control

Likelihood to Recommend

Specific scenarios where this product works well are when: managing a large number of projects and you develop purely through visual studio, amount of the budget to evaluate similar but much more expensive products is not high, your company has developers that need a source code control and if you develop daily with a high frequency.

Luca Campanelli

Senior Betting & Online DB Administrator in Information Technology at Intralot Italia S.p.A.- Gamenet Group (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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