a. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and create new blank solution your project directory. Since I’ve set up D:\may\dev as my projects folder, added new blank solution “VSSDemoSolution” in there.

b. Once you have your solution file, you can add the solution to the source safe by
i. Right click on the solution > add solution to source control or
ii. File > Source Control > Add Solution to Source Control

c. It will ask you to choose your VSS DB and login to it. Once you’ve login “Add to Source Project” dialogue box will pop up with your solution name with .root extension in the project text box. You can either remove the .root from the solution file name and click “Create” to create a folder or simply by removing the whole name and click “OK” will add the solution file to the VSS. My preference is to remove the whole given name from the Project text box and click on “OK” button. Save a few mouse clicks.

d. Once been done, you should be able to see your solution file added to in the VSS Explorer. One irritating thing about source safe is that there is no auto refresh or F5 which make you to either close the explorer and reopen it or collapse the tree view and extend again or just click on refresh button.
Now you have successfully added a new solution to source safe database.

Open the VSS Explorer, it’ll ask you to choose the specific database.

VSS Explorer displays important status information, such as your current working folder, search criteria, number of files, and so on. Some of this information is shown in file pane column headings, and other information is shown in the status bar at the bottom of the VSS Explorer window. The title bar of VSS Explorer shows the database you are connected to. VSS Explorer uses symbols to provide information about the files and projects.

Browse to the location where you create your db and point to srcsafe.ini. (In my example D:\may\DATA\VSSDemo\srcsafe.ini is where my database is and I’ve given the name “VSSDemo” for that database.)

After selecting the required database, you may have to login with your username and password. Since this is my local VSS, I can use “admin” with no password to login to any database.

You will then be able to access the VSS Explorer as shown in the following figure.

By default there is no working folder been set. You will need to set up your working folder according to your directory structure.

The working folder is where you actually work on a file. When you Check Out or Get a file, VSS copies the item into your working folder for that project. After you make changes to the file and check it in, VSS copies it from your working folder back into the database.

Since my projects are going to be in D:\may\dev, I’ve set my root “$” to be D:\may\dev.
NB: While you are working with the team, it is very important that, all your team members set up their local directory the same structure as in VSS. This will make it a lot easier for working with files check-ins/outs.

Currently we are setting up the proper team environment and all necessary procedures to start our main project of the year. We’ve been looking through and studying many to get ready for that including Visual Source Safe which is one of the requirements for team project.

Personally I hate VSS and I prefer not to work with it as much as possible. There are lots of personal reasons for that one of which is I do not like working with team which always mess up my schedules, another is VSS is a big pain to work with. Anyway I can’t complain since we all be using that a lot so I tried to familiarize and learn it as much as I can. I’ll be posting some notes on VSS as I study in coming week. Here is the first lots.

Creating a VSS Database

• From VSS Administrator panel > Tools > Create Databases
• Browse to a directory where you want to place your VSS DB (If you are saving your DB on the server then you need to map the drive before choosing the mapped drive)
• Click on “Ok” and it will create new VSS DB in the specified location.
• More options can be set on your Db by selecting Tools > options
• You may wish to add team members/users of the db by creating new users to your db.
• The VSS Db folder now contains:
  • Data folder
  • Temp folder
  • Users folder
  • srcsafe.ini and
  • users.txt

For the purpose of this demo, I’ll be using D:\ for all my project files.
Good readings from MSDN Library:
ms-help://MS.MSDNQTR.2003FEB.1033/dnbda/html/tdlg_ch6.htm
ms-help://MS.MSDNQTR.2003FEB.1033/guides/html/vstskworking_folders.htm