Solo Technology

We use Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe (prior mentions) at the office for basic source/version control. It generally fills the bill for our needs — small teams and not a ton of projects to manage. That being said, I don’t think there’s anyone that would ever state that VSS’s reporting features are all that great. Trying to get a handle on what’s changed when and by who is a pain.

To a large extent, that reporting issue went away for us today. I found VSS Reporter and am loving it. Some info from the page:

At its simplest, VssReporter is a tool for querying SourceSafe to find out what source files have been changed after, before or between certain date(s).

Dates can be an explicit eg ‘02/08/2002′ or the implicit eg a label.

It will allow you to query for modifications made by anyone, only yourself, or a named coder.

The ability to run a quick report to find changes in the last day/week alone are priceless. It will even show the comment associated with the last change. Why is this such a big deal to me? Some of my VSS Projects link in some source that is shared across multiple projects. While we’re a small shop, we don’t always remember to tell each other when we’ve modified those shared bits… now, instead of wandering through VSS looking at checkin times, I can just run a quick report against my own project and spot if any shared things were checked in. Too cool.

If you’re still running VSS (5 or 6, although this rumored to work with the new 2005 version as well), I’d highly suggest picking this one up.

[found this in today's Daily Grind]

Leave a Reply