Save valuable development time with Visual SourceSafe

Do you recognise this situation? You spend an awfull time developing a great looking page for your client and it works like a rocket. The next day the client calls you to say that this is not exactly what he has in mind. He wants to change something. And yes, the guy has a point. So you agree to dive into that. But the moment you put down the phone you realise that this is not going to be easy to build. And the next days you spend exploring possibilities, checking out options and trying out possible solutions. And before you it, you have a folder full of temporary pages that all work more or less. That is, if you are smart. If you didn't give it carefull thought, you keep editing this one page untill you are satisfied. This is a very risky strategy, because there is a very good chance that, after working your butt off for several days, you find out that you are on the wrong track. That you realise that you should go back to the idea you were trying out a few days ago.

So be smart and save your temporary files. But how to manage those? Chances are that you ended up with a bunch of files with names like searchpage_backup.asp, searchpage_backup2.asp, searchpage_backup2-a.asp, etc. Not exactly a solid development model, don't you agree? How are you going to find your way in a mess like the one on the left?

Versioning is the answer here. There is excellent versioning software for this problem. If you are working on a webserver that has WebDav installed, you might use a WebDav-client to keep track of changes. WebDav is basically free, but good client software isn't allways.If you are looking for a solution that works easy and is well integrated with Dreamweaver Ultradev and DMX, have a look at Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. It is bundled with Visual Studio.NET and (maybe) also with Visual Interdev. It is also available as a stand alone application. The current version is 6. It is an investment you will never regret as it will save you countless hours of work.

What VSS does is storing all the changes you make to your pages in a database. Which means that you can use VSS to roll back to whatever previous version of your document you whish. Even better, VSS shows you a dual pane window, which scrolls both panes simultanously, with all differences between versions of your document shown in clear highlights. It doesn't matter if you changed just one comma or if you entirely recreated the page. VSS keeps track for you. And it works with allmost every textbased file type you can think of .

But it is getting even better. VSS gives you the option of entering comments for every change you make to the pages. Suppose you are working on a series of search pages and you are experimenting a lot, adding comments helps to find back that old version in which you tested a particular option without going through the code again.

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The entire system could not work easier. You create a project in VSS and you add folders on your development machine to this project. From that moment on your files are locked by VSS. You will notice that those files all get a locked-symbol in Dreamweaver. So when i want to work on a number of files, i 'check them out' in VSS. VSS releases these files for editing in whatever program you choose to work in. The lock symbols in Dreamweaver are gone.

If you are finished working on these pages in Dreamweaver, you switch to VSS and you select the checked out files which are marked with a red border and you choose "Check in". To see the changes you made to this file in the past, you rightclick the filename and choose "History". VSS then opens this window.

You can then select two versions and click on "Diff" to see the differences between those files. VSS will show you those in a dual pane window. It allowes you to copy-paste old code from the previous version, or do a integral roll back of the document.

Pretty cool stuff. Once you tried, you will never want to work without this invaluable lifesaver. VSS is extremely powerfull and there is a lot more to tell about this great software. But the help section is excellent and will get you up and running in no time. There is one thing i haven't quite figured out myself. If you adjust your site settings in Dreamweaver, something weird happens. In the Remote settings windows i normally select "local network" because i test on the same development machine i actually work on. There is also the option to choose for "SourceSafe Database". I never got that to work. Might be a bug in Dreamweaver or VSS. I don't know. But selecting that obvious choice will make previewing your work either a real pain or litteraly impossible. Dreamweaver generates a temporary file for the preview and that temp-file is not in the VSS database. So the browser start looking for a file called TMPj1e758swp6.asp in the VSS database, which it can not find of course. It might be matter of finetuning the integration between DMX and VSS by adjusting some settings. If there is someone out there who solved this, please respond. But the Macromedia documentation or website doesn't cover this issue. The best option is just to stick with the normal settings and preview/test using "local network".