Here is the short introduction of the great article of  Alan De Smet . Please goto the author’s website for the fulltext and there are some upgrade of the article.

The author introduced the shortcomings of SourceSafe and hoped  to dissuade us from using SourceSafe, and have spared us the bad experiences he had.

Alan De Smet provided the missing features of the Micosoft SourceSafe:

  • SourceSafe lacks usable branching support
  • SourceSafe cannot be safely extended
  • SourceSafe silently leaves stale files on your local system
  • SourceSafe badly handles slow networks and the public internet
  • Managing third party modules is difficult with SourceSafe
  • Viewing and retrieving historical versions is extremely slow
  • Difficult to maintain multiple local copies of one project

Alan De Smet also thought that the safety of SourceSafe was bad.

  • SourceSafe degrades on large projects
  • SourceSafe integration can crash Visual Studio
  • SourceSafe relies on dangerous file sharing
  • SourceSafe should be scanned for corruption weekly
  • SourceSafe handles multiple time zones badly
  • SourceSafe becomes corrupted

And at last, Alan De Smet  suggested us to transfer our souce control system to some better choice.

The original fulltext is here.