During my tenure with all my previous companies I was the subject of Source Control abuse at the hands of Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS). VSS was available as a default, it required very little to setup, and prohardly any training. I think this is the main reason why I had gone so many years without trying any alternatives.

At Corillian the main Source Control software is CVS which provides an order of magnitude improvement over VSS. I have been using CVS for a year now in parallel with colleagues and even departments, on projects in various stages of completion. Each project working with the knowledge that they are sufficiently abstracted from one another, yet just a few Beyond Compare reviews away from being in complete synchronized harmony.

Recently we have seen a shift that really started with Product Team towards Subversion (SVN), another Open Source version control software that again provides improvements over CVS. The main issue that SVN addressed at Corillian was the idea of security, as neither VSS or CVS meet the requirements determined by some of our clients and we are obligated to address them quickly.

Corillian sponsored some internal training session, that were necessary, as it takes a little while to get your mind to start thinking in SVN speak, it is as different CVS as CVS is to VSS. However, the training was skillfully executed by one of our Staff Engineers, Stuart Celarier (pronounced like Perrier, but with a 'C', he really set the bar high for remote training ).

There remains no excuse in risking your intellectual property to the abusive and unreliable hands of VSS, there are several viable alternatives that can fit most software development life cycles. Here is a blurb Scott H left on this discussion a year ago.


Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." - James M. Barrie



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