Windows Developer Power Tools

11.4 Removing Visual Source Safe Bindings with SourceSafe Binding Remover

Visual Source Safe 6.0 (VSS) has been a mainstay version-control system for many development teams, due in no small part to its price tag (free with Visual Studio 2003). However, SourceSafe has certain limitations, including lack of support for the edit/merge/commit model, and it does not scale well once your team or file count reaches a certain size. Most developers quickly realize that there are better free solutions available, such as Subversion and CVS. But unfortunately, VSS scatters extra files throughout your source tree and makes changes to your solution files, making it very difficult to switch version-control systems or to easily distribute your project to developers who don’t have access to your repository.

Darrell Norton solves this problem with his SourceSafe Binding Remover tool, available at GotDotNet. The Binding Remover purges everything related to VSS from the solution and project files and deletes all SourceSafe bindings files from your source-code tree.

An example of the additional cruft added into a solution file can be found in SourceSafe Binding Remover’s own SourceSafeBindingRemover.sln file:

GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution SccNumberOfProjects = 2 SccLocalPath0 = . CanCheckoutShared = false SolutionUniqueID = {634C866F-3CEB-43A1-9C7F-D34A03F0A044} SccProjectUniqueName1 = SourceSafeBindingRemover\\SourceSafeBindingRemover.csproj SccLocalPath1 = . CanCheckoutShared = false ...