What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 teaches you the basic terminology and concepts used in the SCM world, and how SCM integrates in the Software Development Lifecycle.

Chapter 2 introduces you to Microsoft's SCM tool for small and medium teams: Visual SourceSafe 2005. You'll learn what this product is made of, and what new features and improvements it has over the previous versions.

Chapter 3 introduces Orbital Hotel, a hotel-reservation system application, which will be used in the next chapters as a case study for developing Visual Studio applications with SourceSafe. We will see what the best structure for Visual Studio solutions is when working under Source Control.

Chapter 4 discusses the various ways you can add a software project to the SourceSafe database. This is the first step you'll take when starting to develop an application under Source Control.

Chapter 5 covers the Source Control operations used daily in our development activities. We'll set up a new workspace and get the solution from the SourceSafe database. Then, we will add new files to the solution, check them in, examine their history, and get latest versions. We will also explore the team-cooperation models and see what are the differences between them, their advantages and disadvantages, and operations such as item comparison, undoing changes, file merging and pinning, and conflict resolution.

Chapter 6 teaches you how to access the SourceSafe server through the intranet or the Internet, in order to perform the necessary Source Control tasks. If you don't have an internet connection at the remote location, or if the local SourceSafe server is temporarily down, you can work offline, provided you already have the solution files on your remote machine. When a connection to the database becomes available again, you reconnect to the SourceSafe database and synchronize the changes. Depending on the database configuration and the Visual Studio plug-ins you use while reconnecting, there are some scenarios to consider for avoiding data loss. We will examine the possible scenarios that can lead to data loss and see how to avoid such situations.

Chapter 7 teaches you how to manage the software development lifecycle using SourceSafe. In the evolution of software products there are many milestones. We will see how to manage them using SourceSafe so that we can reproduce their specific configurations when needed. We will also talk about the build process and how a periodical build can catch integration problems early on. We will take a brief look at white-box and black-box tests and how they help in ensuring final product quality. Last but not the least, we will see how to maintain multiple product versions to be able to release service packs while continuing development towards the next versions.

Appendix A covers the installation steps for Visual SourceSafe 2005 and the configuration for remote access.

Appendix B describes how to perform SourceSafe database administration tasks such as creating and securing databases, managing database and Windows users, creating shadow folders, and configuring the services for the SourceSafe plug-ins in Visual Studio.

Appendix C discusses how to perform maintenance tasks on SourceSafe databases such as undoing user checkouts, changing the team version control model, locking, archiving, restoring, and running database maintenance tools.