Teamsite or VSS?

Really want to use teamsite for all source control, but some of my developers are touting visual source safe. Can I get opinions?

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Adam Stoller

This is obviously a biased opinion - but:
Interwoven uses TeamSite internally for version control.
Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, does not use VSS internally for version control (last I heard, they mostly used an internal program called "SLIME").

If the source being version controlled has anything to do with content management / web-sites - TeamSite provides the virtualization features that allow you to perform in-context QA. VSS does not (as far as I know).

On the financial side - if you don't have either product, and only want version control - then VSS probably makes more fiscal sense than TeamSite - but frankly, CVS would make more fiscal sense than VSS and I think it's generally a lot better supported than VSS. If you already have TeamSite in-house - the above is not really a factor.

There are probably other trade-offs.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

tvaughan

Also, poll your developers-- do they do their development primarily in a GUI with a Visual-**** type program?

Or are they command line, vi/emacs-based, developers?

Like fish mentioned, a lot of it also has to do with what they're developing. . . is it Java Beans for some web site, or is it custom scripts for TeamSite?

Having been a developer, I'd say that if your guys are doing GUI-based development of Beans, etc. then go with VSS-- it is less cumbersome than TeamSite to check stuff in and get builds out. If your guys are doing command line based development of scripts, go with TeamSite-- it can be amazingly fast and provides a great environment with very few modifications.

(Of course, I'm assuming here that you don't have TeamCode-- which I've never used, but which would present yet another option).

Tom

nico

we own teamsite and are an asp microsoft house. my developers are open to teamsite however they tell me how in vss you can specify where downloaded files/directories will download to on your local system per download. However it appears in ts that all downloads go to the one iwtemp directory you have specified locally. Is there a way to meet the vss option in ts?

Thanks,
Nico

tvaughan

Hi Nico,

If you use "Edit-->Configure LaunchPad" you can specify the default download directory for files pulled down from TeamSite. "C:\IWTemp" is the default.

However, regardless of what you specify (say . . . C:\Dev ), any downloaded file will still be saved in a fairly extensive sub-sub-sub-directory.

For example, the shortest path I think you can have would be:
C:\Dev\server\cache\default\main\src\

Where "server" is the machine name of your TS server and "src" is some branch immediately under the main branch.

This usually isn't a big deal for modern editors like DreamWeaver or VisualJ because you can set your "project home" to be that long path, and you'll only ever see the directories relative to that "project home"

Hope that helps,
Tom