In a previous entry I spoke negatively about Visual SourceSafe 2005, in particular regarding the internet functionality (functionality that promises the HTTP transport accessibility of a limited number of source control options, in a client/server fashion. This is critical if you want to use SourceSafe functionality over a firewalled connection, or a limited bandwidth connection, and brings a limited amount of SourceOffSite-like functionality to the vanilla SourceSafe).

While my remarks about the server-side configuration of this functionality still stand (it's a terrible setup that fails on anything but a clean OS install), I finally took a few moments and figured out why I couldn't do source control operations with the internet plug-in (e.g. it was reverting to SMB, thrwarting my ability to get some throughput metrics) - The problem was that I had failed to select the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (internet) plug-in as the current plug-in provider. After setting that, the internet option works smoothly. I'll have an entry about the results of that soon.

To explain how this confusion could happen, consider how you setup a connection in Visual Studio 2005 (which is the only place where this remote option works).

First, or so it appears, you choose which technique you'll connect with for this new source database entry.

Then you tell it where to find the web service, and what database for the web service to use.

Don't worry about that UNC path there - the help tells us...

Note: Because the Web service can serve multiple databases, you must specify the known path of the Visual SourceSafe database. You do not need local access to that path, it is used by the Visual SourceSafe Web Service to communicate with the database.

Great! Easy peasie!

Not quite. Everytime I tried open the new connection, it was working -- but then I looked on the other "machine" (a virtual machine) and noticed all of the SMB connections from my machine. That tricky devil was opening the database the old fashioned way. So I blocked network access to the share (still allowing it locally), trying to force it to use the internet connectivity that it appeared that I was configuring, to get this error when trying to add an internet database.

Of course this is nonsense - it isn't the web service that's having the problem, as the web service on the remote PC can access the files fine. The problem is that the SourceSafe plug-in on my machine was trying to open the files through the file share using old-style SMB.

Finally I came across the provider setting, choosing..

Now the functionality works. On the bright side the same SourceSafe database entry can be used for both SMB and internet connectivity, switching the plug-in depending upon connection, however it would have been nice if the brain-dead configuration and help were a little more helpful with this.