Composer vs. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

It can/must be used for any size of software project. Not only provides the best way to control depencies, but also has a strong worldwide community of developers.

Incentivized

The only time I could recommend Microsoft Visual SourceSafe would be for a beginner who has a small amount of code that they would like to keep track of. This solution would not be recommended for an enterprise or any shop where you have multiple developers working on the same solution.

Incentivized

• Controlling dependencies
• Fast dependency resolver
• Easy to use dependency injection

Incentivized

• avoid losing code
• versioning of previous projects
• saving versions on db

Incentivized

• Sometimes a bit slow, but v2 made a lot of improvements on that
• If everything is modular, setting up a local dev environment is a bit trickier than having everything in the same repo
• Might be hard to adopt with some frameworks which have not fully embraced it, like Wordpress

Incentivized

• Becoming corrupt and having to be rebuild from a previous version.
• It can be extremely slow to check in & out of.
• Lost support several years ago from Microsoft.

Overall Microsoft Visual Source Safe is very easy to use. It is a simple application that does only one thing. It has the basic windows tree structure for listing projects and solutions. There is no way to search for a particular file, project or solution. There is also no way to search the code in the files.

Incentivized

There is no longer support for Visual SourceSafe as I believe it's been retired. There are, however, users that still use the tool and they do help if there are questions or complaints.

If you're familiar with npm or Yarn, you'll feel right at home with composer. The work in pretty much the same way. You can use a composer.json file in your repo to reference specific version of public community modules, and enterprise internal ones. You can also hook some scripts that you would want to execute, like for testing, building your code ...

Incentivized

Azure DevOps is a much better, more modern tool that Visual SourceSafe and everyone should be moving to it. Most if not all the integration that is there can be done or emulated in it

• Helped us reduce the TTM of our ecommerce factory by about 40% since we adopted it
• Code re-usability became the norm, and thus much shorter development cycles
• New websites go live much faster, and thus cost way less money to make when reusing composer modules (SSO, CRM integration, modules to call Internal APIs ...)

Incentivized

• When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
• We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.

Incentivized