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

Chapter 6. Working from Remote Locations

While most of the time the development process is conducted from the local development site, sometimes situations where we need to work from remote locations arise.

To be able to work online from other locations, we need a way to access the SourceSafe server through the intranet or the Internet, in order to perform our source control tasks.

If we don't have an internet connection at the remote location, or if the local SourceSafe server is temporarily down, we can work offline, provided we already have the solution files on our remote machine. When a connection to the database becomes available again, we reconnect to the SourceSafe database and synchronize the changes. Depending on the database configuration and the Visual Studio plug-ins we use while reconnecting, there are some scenarios to consider for avoiding data loss. We will examine the possible scenarios that can lead to data loss and see how to avoid such situations.

Working Online

If we have...