Source code control for Visual Studio 2005

The hype surrounding Visual Studio 2005 almost makes you not notice all the other upcoming Microsoft developer products which will accompany VS2K5. One of these products is the new source code control system. This January at the ASP.NET 2.0 roadshow in Amsterdam, Scott Guthrie (leading engineer on the ASP.NET 2.0 team) described the new source code control system as ‘SourceSafe done right’.

Microsoft will be delivering Team Foundation which not only will allow you to add source control to your solutions, but also makes it easier to track work items as their status is available at all time. Integration with common Office applications like Project and Excel make it easy to get an overview of the current status for a project. A quote, taken from “Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Enterprise-Class Source Control and Work Item Tracking” (link):

Visual Studio Team Foundation includes an enterprise-class source control provider that picks up where Visual SourceSafe leaves off. It is reliable, scalable, fast, more securable, extensible, and includes almost all of the easy to use Visual SourceSafe features with which you and your team are already familiar.

The Visual Studio Team Foundation source control provider ships as a standalone SCM application or as an integrated change management component in Visual Studio 2005 Team System. Inside Visual Studio, the Team Foundation source control plug-in reduces the complexity of source control by making it an extension of project file management. Developers can perform all source control operations without ever leaving the integrated development environment (IDE) or opening another application.

Inside or outside Visual Studio, the Team Foundation source control provider seamlessly integrates with other Team System components such as work item tracking and reporting.

Source Control Provider Description
Implemented as an ASP.NET Web service, the Visual Studio Team Foundation source control provider enables you to access and manage your source-controlled configuration items from anywhere on the Internet.
Source files and project metadata are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Source control operations are performed in an atomic and transactional way. This architecture has the following advantages:

• Scalability: Given sufficient hardware, your source control repository can contain over a terabyte of data. Team Foundation supports between five and 500 users.
• Integrity and Reliability: The types of data integrity issues associated with file-based source control applications are practically eliminated.
• Speed: Depending on the operation requested, Team Foundation is orders of magnitude faster than Visual SourceSafe.

But what about SourceSafe? I use that at home!
Microsoft is updating the version control technology of Visual SourceSafe. A new product release with a continued focus on version control, Visual SourceSafe 2005, will update and improve this popular system. For individual developers or small teams who need a lightweight, client-only, file server application for source code control only, Microsoft will continue to enhance and support Visual SourceSafe. Visual SourceSafe 2005 will include enhancements such as remote web access over HTTP, LAN performance booster, Unicode and XML support, and regional time zones and languages.

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