>Has anyone used Visual SourceSafe with Visual FoxPro 5.0? I just wanted to get an idea of how effective you felt it was. How well it integrated with FoxPro. Sorry if this may seem off topic.

Generally it has worked out good for us. VSS may not give you all the bells and whistles as some other source control programs do, but compensates with the major functions you actually need and an easy to use interface. One area that it is lacking is in the reporting capabilities.

As far as integration, it works fairly well with VFP. There are some hitches though. As you get more and more files in a Project, it will take longer and longer to open it. Apparently, each file in the Project is checked against VSS for it's current status (Checked Out etc) and this can cause your Project to take over a minute to load when you get 100+ files in the Project. It also is a real hassle to merge Project files when in a multi-developer setting. (See separate post for more info.) On the plus side, it is very easy to work on a file (Check Out/In), check its revision history, revert to a previous version (Rollback), label a project (so you can later see what version of each project file was used in a release) and check file differences (see next paragraph), all from within VFP.

If you plan to try it, you should get an update to the SCCTEXT.PRG file that fixes a problem with how VFP generates text files based on non-text SCX/VCX/FRX etc files. These generated text files are very helpful to view differences between versions of a Form or Class Library but by default, VFP generates these text files in such a way that they are useless. The changes for SCCTEXT.PRG file can be found in the Oct 97 issue of FoxPro Advisor.

Overall, I would give it a thumbs up and wouldn't program without it (single or multi-developer projects). Like everything else, you just need to learn the quirks and work around them.

-Doug-