How To: Win an Autographed Visual Studio 2005 Baseball

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In response to my previous post, Inspired Software Development::VSS Performance Improvements, Jason Mauss provides an excellent VSS performance tip:

"Most people administrating VSS don't seem to know about setting the CP_OnSelection value to NO. This is incredibly useful for users accessing VSS over a remote connection. Why? Normally whenever you click on a folder (a project or project grouping level) VSS performs a selection operation, which can take a while over a slow remote connection. By setting CP_OnSelection to no, users can drill down in the project hierarchy and just double-click or hit Enter when they find the folder they want to actually select, not having to wait a while for each level they expand. I've found this to solve half of the remote connection slowness issue for me."

At the very moment I was reading Jason's comment, enjoying a hearty bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, an email about VSS performance arrived from one of our hardworking VSS Product Support representatives.

"When using the restore wizard via the SourceSafe admin, you'll notice the CPU using up to 90% processor, but if you click on the title bar of the progress window and hold, utilization goes down to ~15 percent and the restore completes much quicker."

Go figure! This issue appears to repro on all VSS 6.0 builds.

Imagine... You're fresh out of college with a computer science degree. You apply for and get hired as a "Configuration Manager" at a little software company down the street. On your first day, your manager says, "Okay, you've used VSS before, right? Your first task is to sit here and hold down the mouse button on the title bar of this progress window until the restore operation completes." LOL.

Seriously though, the VSS Performance SWAT team is undoubtedly looking into a fix for this issue as I write. In the meantime, if you publish a programmatic fix or workaround (ie, a script that holds down the mouse button for you;-) to this issue on the Internet and you are the first person to do so and notify me of such, I will personally send you a Visual Studio 2005 baseball which has been autographed by me and a few other notable Microsoft bloggers like Raymond Chen, Betsy Aoki, KC Lemson, and Josh Ledgard.