Tips for Using the Control Panel Applet and Service for Dexterity Source Code Control

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Alice Newsam - Click for blog homepageRecently, Rob Anderson and I presented the "What's New in Dexterity for GP 2010 R2" session at the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference in Fargo, so I thought I'd share some of that information with you through a series of posts.  One question that comes up a fair amount of the time is around using and saving information with the Control Panel applet for Dexterity Source Code Control especially on machines that have UAC (User Account Control) turned on so I thought I'd tackle that topic first.

The key piece of information to remember is that on operating systems that have UAC turned on, the Control Panel applet needs to be run with elevated privileges or it will not be able to write the settings correctly to commit your changes.  The tricky part about this is that when this occurs, there is no error that appears letting you know that the settings were not saved.  So, we wanted to share a bit of information on how to ensure this doesn't happen to you!

Let's start with a scenario of why you may need to make changes to these settings.  Say you have decided to migrate one of your Visual Source Safe projects to Team Foundation Server to hook up with Dexterity (which I'll touch on in another post).  However, you still have another project in VSS and you would like to switch between the two.  Another change may be where you want to point your projects to a different location on your machine.  No matter the case, you'll need to use the Control Panel applet to change the settings for DSSC.

 To solve the issue where your changes are not being saved, there are two possible workarounds. The first is to run the control panel applet from an administrative command prompt.  The applet can be found at the following locations:

  • C:\Windows\System\dsccs.cpl (x86)
  • C:\Windows\SysWOW64\dsccs.cpl (x64)

The second workaround is to give yourself write permissions to the DSCCS registry key:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Great Plains Software\Dexterity Source Code Control Server (x86)
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Great Plains Software\Dexterity Source Code Control Server (X64)

We don't recommend giving yourself permissions to much more than this as you can really open your machine up from a security perspective, but giving yourself permissions to this location can be a great help with running and saving information to the DSCCS settings.  The last note to make is that if you use either of these workarounds and make changes to the settings, the Microsoft Dexterity SCCS service will need to be restarted.

The other tip I wanted to share with you is on the DSCCS service itself.  In this scenario you noticed your DSCCS service not starting.  Perhaps you have changed your Windows password or you have a security policy in place that requires you to update your password every certain number of days.  In this case you could uninstall and reinstall the DSCCS service however there is an easier way.  You can:

  • Open the Control Panel
  • Select Administrative Tools
  • Select Services
  • Right click on "Microsoft Dexterity SCCS" and pick Properties
  • Switch to the "Log On' Tab
  • Modify the Log On credentials and Save
  • Restart the Service

Hopefully these tips will save you some time as you go forward and live in the world of DSCCS and UAC!

Have a great day!
Alice