Team Foundation vs. Visual SourceSafe, Part 1

  • Article

On a daily basis, I come upon an interesting and often emerging feature difference between Team Foundation source control (aka, Hatteras) and my last product, Visual SourceSafe (aka, VSS). I plan to keep track of these features...where else?...out here in the wild for everyone to read. Por supuesto. Here's my first installment.

Big Freaky Disclaimer   Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation is an orange tree and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is an apple. They're both sweet but they don't compare. SourceSafe is a standalone source control system for individual developers and small teams. Team Foundation is an integrated work item tracking and source control system for professional development teams of any size. For more information, see The [new] Future of Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft's New Source Code Control Application.

Today's featured difference: Code Churn

A customer asks, “One thing that I am very interested in getting si the # of lines of code added, # of lines of code changed, and the # of lines deleted. I would be able to slice this by date range, project, by individual, or by groups of individuals. I don’t know if you can get this out of VSS 6 but will it be available from Team System?”

  • SourceSafe does not have this feature.

  • Visual Studio Team Foudation does have this feature. Doug Neumann, the omniscient (yo, way plugged-in) source control PM for Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation writes, “The Team System does indeed give you this. You’ll have code churn information for every checkin in the data warehouse and be able to slice the data as you choose.“