R – Switching form Visual SourceSafe to CVS: what features are lost in Visual Studio

cvsvisual studiovisual-sourcesafe

My company is using Visual SourceSafe (VSS) and Visual Studio 2005 (soon 2008). They want to switch to CVS, but the developers don't want to lose the integration we get with VSS and Visual Studio.

I know there are CVS plugins, but what functionality, if any, is lost with CVS?

Best Answer

Screaming at VSS for lost source code, etc. Seriously though, it is a very different model (optimistic locking), so you will probably lose some productivity for the first little while. I would probably look at using TortoiseCVS and "Open Folder In Windows Explorer" right-click or the Visual Studio Explorer plug-in rather than a CVS plug-in if you are using Visual Studio 2008 (all of the CVS plug-ins I have tried have had either serious functionality issues, or serious stability issues).

VSS is really a terrible source control system, and moving to a modern style (optimistic locking) source control system will be a huge boon in the long run. You might want to skip the 1990s all together though and move to Subversion/Git/Mercurial and get into the 2000s.