One of the most important software development tools out of Redmond, remarkably, is Visual SourceSafe - In shops across the land, it is the source control system.

Granted those shops probably didn't kick the tires of the competitors, rigorously choosing amongst the competing SCM tools before investing their time and codebase to VSS. Instead they likely found it bundled in their MSDN subscription, or attached to some other Microsoft product, and read soothing words about the excellent integration with Visual Studio. They brought that poor, weepy-eyed little source control tool in from the rain, gave it some cocoa, and sat it down by the fireplace. Soon enough it became their hammer, and an integral part of their development process (probably a hated part of their development process. If you've ever fought with an offline complex Visual Studio project, you'll know what I mean by that).

The remarkable part of all of this is the absolutely terrible treatment that Microsoft has given this product. It recently got the first real update that it has gotten since Visual Studio 6, remaining largely static over the intervening period (with trivial little changes). While you could say that you shouldn't mess with something that works, Visual SourceSafe has carried some absolutely terrible flaws through the years, most obvious being the file database method of operation that led to endless security and reliability problems. SourceSafe 2005 didn't do anything to fix that fundamental problem.

Even with the new release, Visual SourceSafe users are still used and abused, though. I decided to put the product through its paces, both for consulting purposes, and for yafla software development, and I am absolutely amazed by the problems and pitfalls. From missing options (like turning off HTTPS from the client when trying to use the internet option), to terrible typos and transpositions in their instructions (did they read these things? Things like telling you to run aspnet_iisreg rather than the correct aspnet_regiis), to installs that just completely fail to work under anything but a cleanroom install (for instance it insists that you don't really have IIS if your first website isn't internally coded "1"). On three separate machines the internet hosting option (one of the major new options, finally adding marginal client-server functionality, albeit with a host of caveats and limitations) didn't install properly. I finally had to setup a new, freshly installed virtual machine to give it what was likely the only environment they tested it in, and it appears to install marginally properly.

If, through some magic, I get this product working properly, I'll post a quick summary (I had hoped to get some metrics of the savings that both the internet web service option, and the SSService option, brought to the table), but as it is I'm simply amazed at how botched this whole process has been. They've been working on this product for how long now?