windows xp resource center

(...) Microsoft does in fact use VSS in-house for their production. I know this, because I worked there.
VSS is an excellent program to use as long as you have the staff (which any decent IT department should have) with the know-how to use it. We didn't have any problems incorporating it into part of our daily routine, and we used it to produce the entire Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit, both online and print versions. We also used it for Windows 2000 Help, and we used it for the Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit as well.
Since moving on from Microsoft, I've found other such production tools to be clunky, and I heartily recommend VSS. Obviously you need someone in your IT department to have the know-how to implement it, but that's the same with *any* such software program. The time and money you save by eliminating human error in the writing and editing process for any style of development is huge, and VSS is absolutely indispensable for professional-level development of product. Once you get everyone accustomed to using it, it becomes second nature and a seamless part of the normal production process.

Source Code Management, no doubt, is a vital part of any development shop. Any team based development effort needs a centralized repository in which to store their work.

That being said, I would implore you to choose another product - such as the open source CVS (which can hook into VS.net with the right plug-ins).

VSS is a buggy, unreliable, unbearably slow...and fundamentally unuseable product. This is *not* the sort of system you should use hold vital data that ammounts to months and months of hard work.

For your sanity and your time, DO NOT buy this product. As each version seems to bring very little in the way of rethinking this disaster, Microsoft has made it very clear that they could care less about source control.

(by the way, MS doesn't even use this product in-house).

If all you ever want of your revison-control software is ``check-in'' and ``get latest version'', then perhaps this is the tool for you.

If you want to have branching for separate development paths, tools for merging contributions from separate sources, and abilities to affix attributes and labels in non-trivial ways then you are out of luck. To get these features, try ClearCase by Rational Software.

There is no comparison with the config-spec methadology of ClearCase, which allows one to specify exactly which file/directory elements are assembled into your ``view''.

If Microsoft truely believed in their product Visual SourceSafe, then wouldn't they use it themselves? No. They use ClearCase.
QED.