How do I integrate VSS 6 so that VB 6 automatically checks out when editing?

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0.

I have them integrated but when I check out a Project and then try to edit a module in that project it's locked and I have to manually right-click on it and do a Check Out to unlock it.

I thought there was a way to have VSS automatically check out the file for editing.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Best solution I found was to check out all the files. Took a bit of poking around to figure out how to do that. Here's how: How to check out all VB6 Project files from VSS?

Answer 2

I agree with kris here. Now I know that a bunch of folks saying your "software stinks" doesn't really answer your question. But there is a world of difference between a check out style source control and a file locking system like Source safe. The general consensus is that Check out systems are far superior.

With check out, what you do is you check out the project from your repository. All the files are editable. You work on your project as normally. Then before you checkin you do another update. If anybody else in your team did a update the software will automatically merge in the changes into your code. You will have a chance to review the merges and resolve any conflicts. After the update you can then check in your changes which everyone else can retrieve.

The big scary part is the merging part. Back when CVS and subversion where just command line tools it was a little scary as it was a pain to retrieve what happened with the merging. But with today's tools like Tortoise is all visual. In the last couple of years I can't think of any instance where a automatic merge failed. Any conflicts (basically two people edit the same line of code) are display right here for you to resolve.

Subversion

Tortoise SVN

Answer 3

There is an option in SourceSafe under the "Local Files" tab labeled "Use read-only flag for files that are not checked out". By default this option is selected, but if you unselect it, you will be able to edit any file in the project without checking it out.

Once you uncheck the option, you can get the latest version of a project to remove the read-only flag from all the files.

When you check out a file, you will be warned that there is a writable copy of the file in your working folder, at which time you can replace it with the version in the SourceSafe database.

Answer 4

I never figured out a way to do this. It was always a huge pain. Sorry for posting a negative answer, but I figured that you might want to know that you aren't alone in hating this, but that there wasn't an immediate and obvious answer. I'll be following this question along with you in case someone out there does know of a solution...

Answer 5

I don't think it is possible to do this (at least it wasn't when we used VSS eight years ago), but while you are experiencing the pain of a check out styled source control, run - don't walk, to some real, non-locking style source control solution. SVN, CVS, Git, Mecruial, anything that doesn't lock files, and doesn't leave your source in a proprietary file sytem. We switched to CVS eight years ago because we lost all of our source history (the code was checkout out so it was retrievable), due to a VSS glitch. Best thing we ever did, made collaboration ten times easier. Now CVS isn't the best solution (it was the most reasonable solution for windows back then), but anything is better than VSS.

Answer 6

when I check out a Project and then try to edit a module in that project it's locked and I have to manually right-click on it and do a Check Out to unlock it

Like it or not, it works that way by design i.e. you can check out all the files but you have to explicitly choose to do so, rather than being the default option. I guess that's because checking out all modules (class modules, forms, usercontrols, etc) locks out all other users from the entire project, which is normally undesirable in a team collaboration environment.