Visual Source Safe --> TFS Migration

Question

Around here we have been working with a bunch of Visual Source Safe repositories for about 10 years or so.

Now I want to get rid of sourcesafe and move on to Team Foundation Server.

Do you have any tips or tricks for me before I embark on this migration? What are the things I have to be careful about?

I am sure this migration will mean that our working habits have to be modified in some way. Do you think that these changes could be a problem for the organization? Think about a group of about 20 .NET developers in a single site.

Answer 1

There are a few different ways you can migrate. The tool will pull your history, etc. over, but the more pragmatic and simple way is to lock VSS as a history archive and start fresh:

1. Have everyone check in all changes into VSS, make sure everything builds, etc.
2. Set all VSS databases to "locked" (read-only rights for all users)
3. Get Latest on the entire VSS database into a "clean" set of folders on a workstation
4. Check all of the files into TFS from the workstation

For any history prior to the conversion, folks need to go to VSS, but after a week or two it's realistically unlikely to happen all that often. And you know that the history in VSS is accurate and not corrupted by the conversion process.

Answer 2

Be aware that TFS does not support sharing files between different projects, as VSS does. If you have any such shared files the link between them will be broken during the migration, resulting in initially identical, but now distinct files in each project. Updates to one of these files in TFS will no longer propagate to the copies in the other projects.