Book Image

Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice

Book Image

Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice

Overview of this book

Why is Software Configuration Management important?Software Configuration Management (SCM) is the discipline of managing the building and modification of software through techniques including source-code control, revision control, object-build tracking, and release construction. SCM involves identifying the configuration of the software at given points in time, systematically controlling changes to the configuration, and maintaining the integrity and traceability of the configuration throughout the software development lifecycle.Software Configuration Management is one of the first skills a serious developer should master, after becoming proficient with his or her development tools of choice. Unfortunately, this does not always happen because the subject of SCM is not commonly taught in either academic or company training.When developing software, you need to have a manageable team development effort, track and maintain the history of your projects, sustain parallel development on multiple product versions, fix bugs, and release service packs while further developing the application. This is where the concepts of Software Configuration Management come into play; SCM is about getting the job done safer, faster, and better.Visual SourceSafe has a long history behind it. The previous versions were either loved for their ease of use and integration with other Microsoft products, or hated because the headaches caused by using them improperly. This book will help you to avoid such problems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Undoing Version Changes


This is useful when we want to use a past version as a starting point for new changes.

To see how the Multiple Check-Out Model behaves compared to the exclusive check-out model, we will go through the same set of changes and observe the differences between the two models. In order to do that we need to start from the same file version we started with when using the Exclusive Check-Out Model. Hence, we need to undo the changes and revert back to the starting version.

We could, of course, manually change the file to be the same as the starting version, but we can use the built-in functionality in SourceSafe to do just that.

There are two approaches to undo version changes depending on the history we need to keep:

  • Getting older versions

  • Rolling back changes

Getting Older Versions

When we need to undo version changes, while keeping those changes in the history, we will need to retrieve the older version we want to revert to and start the new changes from there. In order to...