Vacation is a quaint problem lol, at least you know they’re eventually coming back. What do we do about the guy who retired 5 years ago and still has locked files in his name?
Yes! That’s the one I was struggling to remember the name of. My previous employer started on Visual SourceSafe in the 90s and migrated to Team Foundation Server (TFS) in the 2000s. There were still remnants of SourceSafe when I worked there (2010 to 2013).
I remember TFS had locks for binary files. There was one time we had to figure out how to remove locks held by an ex-employee - they were doing a big branch merge when they left the company, and left all the files locked. It didn’t automatically drop the locks when their account was deleted.
They had a bunch of VB6 COM components last modified in 1999 that I’m 80% sure are still in prod today. It was still working and Microsoft were still supporting VB6 and Classic ASP, so there wasn’t a big rush to rewrite it.
At the start of COVID, I migrated our three projects to git from VSS. I also wrote a doc for our other teams to do the same. It was amazing once we got it working. Small team of 3, but we started using feature branches which enabled us to easily merge everything into a testing branch and release only certain features at a time. So much cleaner.
Before I left, I almost got semi automatic CI/CD working with Jenkins!
I remember when our company split up and we had to give them the source code of some older versions that they still used. We couldn’t do that because the repo was corrupt meaning that we couldn’t access some older revisions. We had no problems using it day to day so nobody noticed which meant that all backups were also corrupted.
Yeah VSS was the predecessor to TFS, and now TFS is called Azure DevOps… whatever the fuck that means, Microsoft needs to get it together with product naming. Anyway TFS sucks major rotten ass. I have my problems with git - namely user friendliness - but TortoiseGit has put all those troubles to rest.
I started at a company that uses ADO (migrating to GitHub this year) and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to change repositories in the UI… idk how they built something that unuser friendly
I could go all day with my grievances… For some fucking reason, Team Foundation Server thought it would be a good idea to model their source control on folders and files rather than atomic nodes of changes like git.
I’m sure someone thought this was intuitive, but it falls apart once you realize you can check in cross-branch or even cross-project files into a single changeset. This allows you to easily pollute projects you’re working on but didn’t intend to modify yet, if you forgot to exclude their files. And then, when your code reviewer checks the history of the project folder you modified, they don’t even notice all the files you changed that WEREN’T in that folder but were part of the same changeset. So you pass your review, and all the sudden there’s unwanted, unnoticed, and untested changes in some other project, with a nice code review stamp on them!
And the entire checkout/checkin system is just flipping the read-only flag on the files in file explorer. It’s the most amateurish shit. If you edit a file in an open, active project, the file gets checked out automatically. But if you’re editing loose scripts that aren’t part of a bespoke SLN or CSPROJ, you have to check those out manually… which it will only tell you to do once you try to save the file.
And then Visual Studio cannot understand that I might need to switch regularly between 2 types of version control systems. If you’re not on the same VCS plugin when you want to open a recent project on it, it doesn’t automatically switch it for you, it just refuses to load the project. The only way to reliably to switch is by going into the options menu, changing it there, THEN loading the project.
git is practically made of grease compared to how stuttery and clunky TFS is. I’ll shed no tears for the fossils who are having a hard time learning git, they will be better off whether they realize it or not.
Wasn’t it Visual SourceSafe or something like that?
God, what a revolution it was when subversion came along and we didn’t have to take turns checking out a file to have exclusive write access.
The worst was when someone left for vacation without releasing their file locks.
Vacation is a quaint problem lol, at least you know they’re eventually coming back. What do we do about the guy who retired 5 years ago and still has locked files in his name?
There are ways…
Is it possible to learn this power?
Yes! That’s the one I was struggling to remember the name of. My previous employer started on Visual SourceSafe in the 90s and migrated to Team Foundation Server (TFS) in the 2000s. There were still remnants of SourceSafe when I worked there (2010 to 2013).
I remember TFS had locks for binary files. There was one time we had to figure out how to remove locks held by an ex-employee - they were doing a big branch merge when they left the company, and left all the files locked. It didn’t automatically drop the locks when their account was deleted.
They had a bunch of VB6 COM components last modified in 1999 that I’m 80% sure are still in prod today. It was still working and Microsoft were still supporting VB6 and Classic ASP, so there wasn’t a big rush to rewrite it.
Welcome to my world… our new lead architect has mandated that we move everything from TFS to GitLab before the end of the year. I hope it comes true.
At the start of COVID, I migrated our three projects to git from VSS. I also wrote a doc for our other teams to do the same. It was amazing once we got it working. Small team of 3, but we started using feature branches which enabled us to easily merge everything into a testing branch and release only certain features at a time. So much cleaner.
Before I left, I almost got semi automatic CI/CD working with Jenkins!
That or when SourceSafe was literally deleting random files because it was full of bugs.
I remember when our company split up and we had to give them the source code of some older versions that they still used. We couldn’t do that because the repo was corrupt meaning that we couldn’t access some older revisions. We had no problems using it day to day so nobody noticed which meant that all backups were also corrupted.
Yeah VSS was the predecessor to TFS, and now TFS is called Azure DevOps… whatever the fuck that means, Microsoft needs to get it together with product naming. Anyway TFS sucks major rotten ass. I have my problems with git - namely user friendliness - but TortoiseGit has put all those troubles to rest.
Nothing like that can fix TFS.
I started at a company that uses ADO (migrating to GitHub this year) and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to change repositories in the UI… idk how they built something that unuser friendly
I could go all day with my grievances… For some fucking reason, Team Foundation Server thought it would be a good idea to model their source control on folders and files rather than atomic nodes of changes like git.
I’m sure someone thought this was intuitive, but it falls apart once you realize you can check in cross-branch or even cross-project files into a single changeset. This allows you to easily pollute projects you’re working on but didn’t intend to modify yet, if you forgot to exclude their files. And then, when your code reviewer checks the history of the project folder you modified, they don’t even notice all the files you changed that WEREN’T in that folder but were part of the same changeset. So you pass your review, and all the sudden there’s unwanted, unnoticed, and untested changes in some other project, with a nice code review stamp on them!
And the entire checkout/checkin system is just flipping the read-only flag on the files in file explorer. It’s the most amateurish shit. If you edit a file in an open, active project, the file gets checked out automatically. But if you’re editing loose scripts that aren’t part of a bespoke SLN or CSPROJ, you have to check those out manually… which it will only tell you to do once you try to save the file.
And then Visual Studio cannot understand that I might need to switch regularly between 2 types of version control systems. If you’re not on the same VCS plugin when you want to open a recent project on it, it doesn’t automatically switch it for you, it just refuses to load the project. The only way to reliably to switch is by going into the options menu, changing it there, THEN loading the project.
git is practically made of grease compared to how stuttery and clunky TFS is. I’ll shed no tears for the fossils who are having a hard time learning git, they will be better off whether they realize it or not.