Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider

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Version 1.0 of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider has been released to the web! This is very exciting for me--the MSSCCI provider allows the integrated use of the new version control system available in Team Foundation Server from products that did not support it OOB such as:

  • Visual Studio .NET 2003
  • Visual Basic 6 (SP6 required)
  • SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

An issue arises with the new MSSCCI provider though--having multiple providers installed on your development machine at once. For example, other devs on my team still use VSS 6.0 for our legacy systems, but now they can begin to migrate the sources over to the new source control system. But managing multiple MSSCCI providers can be a bit tricky. Ed Hintz posted an entry on his blog about dealing with multiple MSSCCI providers and switching between the two. Essentially you can run the following commands to switch easily back and forth in your environments:

From Ed Hintz's entry:

[The] following command line command will set the provider to SourceSafe.

reg add HKLM\Software\SourceCodeControlProvider /v ProviderRegKey /d Software\Microsoft\SourceSafe /f

Likewise, the following command will set the provider to TFS.

reg add HKLM\Software\SourceCodeControlProvider /v ProviderRegKey /d "Software\Microsoft\Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider" /f

If you want to migrate from VSS 6.0 to VSTFS Source management then you would have used the VSSConverter command line utility. Rob Caron has posted an entry on his blog that a 3rd party has created a GUI for the utility to simplify the migration.