The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Remote Source Control

We have an existing project stored in Visual SourceSafe and now our clients would like to have remote access to the source code, in order to have his own developers develop together with us.

We've briefly considered setting up a VPN connection for the client, but are a bit concerned about the security implications and also, apparently SourceSafe has some (performance) issues when combined with VPN.

Then we found SourceOffSite ( http://www.sourcegear.com/sos/ ) which seems to be what we want, at first glance anyway.

Has anyone already used this? Any limitations, caveats etc I should know of?

Sam
Monday, March 8, 2004

Scary. How are you going to manage parallel development?

Gwyn
Monday, March 8, 2004

Thats more of a project management issue than a technical one, I suppose.

As far as I'm concerned, we will be fully in charge of development but the shared source solution will allow them to chip in when it is useful.

But right now, I'm just looking at the architectural setup of it all, we'll deal with the organisational issues after that ;)

S

Sam
Monday, March 8, 2004

Think about the organizational issues now - if you don't, you may well buy/build the wrong solution.

Figure out how you're going to deal with both them and you working in the same parts of the code at the same time. Make sure the solution you buy can support the way you want to work.

Michael Kohne
Monday, March 8, 2004

Do NOT do SourceSafe over VPN. You will corrupt your database within short order.

My recommendation would be to get rid of SourceSafe. If you can't, then SourceOffSite will at least make it workable. Even so, you still need to regularly run the database checks against the SourceSafe database.

For the price, you'd probably be better of using Vault instead (from the same company that offers SourceOffSite).

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, March 8, 2004

We use SourceOffSite for some of our development (about 10 developers) and it is very good if you are already happy with VSS. Still you should use it over VPN if outside DMZ.

coresi
Monday, March 8, 2004

I wish I would've seen this earlier.

SourceOffSite is the BANE of my existence.

Example: Right now I'm trying to get a project. I've done a "Get latest version" twice now yet SoS still says that my files are old.

SUCKS!

Dan Brown
Tuesday, March 9, 2004

There will also be times when you check out a file only to discover that SoS didn't give you the most recent version.

I could go on...

Dan Brown
Tuesday, March 9, 2004