I was reading Arloo’s Making Money By Blogging post and was amazed by his achievement in a short while. A hundred plus bucks for a month is quite an achievement. I was inspired by his dedication to his blog and his efforts on making money out of it, I thought of reviewing how my blog doing.

Looking back my earning ie. $1 to $2 per month and some months my account shows $0, I’m in no competition with him.
My highest ever earning would be $4.28 on August
Boy, I was like WOW! I go over 4 bucks?? WOW! lol.

Now I’m thinking why do I blog?
Do I ever want to make money out of it?
What do I trying to achieve by having my own site?

I think I can perfectly answer those and I’m glad that I still maintain my main purpose.

To answer the question “Why do I blog?”,
I think know I always wanted my little place where I can express my thoughts and opinions freely.
I want to improve my writing and expressing things.
I want to exchange ideas with alike kind of people.
I want to be one of very first Burmese to try new internet technology and
I want to be part of the world fastest growing blogger community.

Do I want to make money out of it?
I’m not sure, may be.
Who wouldn’t want money anyway? We all human right?
If I say, no I don’t want to make money, then I’ll be lying.
So, I’m gonna say, yes I want to make money out of it, if it’s possible.
But I’m not too serious about it.
It won’t be my first priority for blogging and I don’t care if I don’t make a single cent from it.
I’m happy as it is. I add adsense to my blog as every other bloggers do.
But I don’t want to over do it by clattering ads with my contents or site design.
I prefer clear, neat and easy reading pages than every space mess up with ads.
I dislike hate blogs where its content got disappeared under numerious ads.

I appreciate a good content and respect the blogger with creative ideas, a great writer and a decent looking site.
So coming back to my second point, I like to make money but I would rather maintain a decent site with a good content than adding excessive ads to make money from it.

Some of the thing I’m trying to achieve by having my own site is to maintain my ideas, thoughts and notes archived nicely online able to access anytime.
Having this site, I’m trying to publish my progress in life. One day I’ll read those back and may be I’ll laugh or cry about my past happenings.
Also I’m trying to add one more line to my CV where my future employer can easily get to know my personalities as well as any other talents I may have by viewing my personal site.

So now you know why I blog and why have my own site. I wonder why you blog and what’s your plans are.

Seriously this is just too much pain for me. May be I don’t know the easy steps or there is just no easy way out.

Web projects have always been in conflict with Visual Source Safe in many areas especially when adding to VSS with proper directory mapping and moving projects around different VSS DBs.

I unbind the solution, unbind the project, then bind to new DB. First it seems all right with every files checked in. Then I can’t build nor save the whole project. Something about “check out solution” to build or “discard memory change”. Both option won’t save properly. The next restart of the solution will not include the web project and give you a project not found error.

I remove all .scc, mssccprj.scc and .csproj.vspscc files from solution as well as the project and try again. Still giving

me that same old shit error! This is just freaking hell, taking too much of my time trying many different ways.

Some projects binded well after about 3 tries but some just not happening. I tried 6 times for one project and finally about to give up, found the solution.
It’s not a good solution but it’s working.

First of all you’ll have to get rid of all those, vss associated, mentioned files above. Just search in the project folders and delete all.
Once you’ve done that, open solution file (.sln) and project file (.csproj) in NOTEPAD!
Yah you really need to play around with those source files.

In both files, you’ll see some encrypted codes and some understanding configurations. Now you know what to do.
Just have to delete all VSS config parts. Oh yah, you’ll have to uncheck “Read Only” permission from all your files so better allow read to the whole project folder.

Ok back to solution file, you need to remove “GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl)” bit, similar to the following.


GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
SccNumberOfProjects = 1
SccLocalPath0 = .
CanCheckoutShared = true
SolutionUniqueID = {04C8BE20-2A9D-4E0B-9E42-AA9E45834A6F}
EndGlobalSection


Again from project (.csproj) file, delete the followings from the very first config tag.


SccProjectName = "SAK"
SccLocalPath = "SAK"
SccAuxPath = "SAK"
SccProvider = "SAK"


Now that should set things right and your project becomes fresh, offline, unbinded version. You can finally proceed to the binding with new VSSDB as normal new project binding steps.

phweeewwwwww!

That’s the only way I can think of to make it work and it took me hell lotta time to figure it out. So here you go – my note of struggling with vss transfer.
Do let me know if you have better/easier solution to this problem as I very much wish to know the proper method rather than scratching head, pulling hairs, banging around, following above steps.

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