Change Management - Visual Source Safe vs. Team Foundation

There are similarities between them, but also fundamental differences. Here they are.

Visual SourceSafe and Team Foundation source control enable you to accomplish the same basic tasks: develop more than one version of a product at the same time, change a released version of a product without affecting other versions, quickly retrieve a batch of related files, determine who made a change and when, compare revisions of a file, and move changes from one version into another.

But despite many similarities, Team Foundation and Visual SourceSafe differ in fundamental ways.

Architectural Differences

SourceSafe Explorer and the plug-in for Visual Studio read from and write to a Visual SourceSafe database, which is a collection of files that are usually stored in a shared network folder.

Team Foundation is a client-server source control system that uses a .NET Web service to access items stored in a SQL Server database. Team Foundation source control's architecture, offers increased performance and reliability.

 

Functional Differences

Changesets

Conceptually, the internal structure of a Visual SourceSafe database and that of a Team Foundation source control server is similar. Both databases and servers are organized hierarchically. Folders contain files. Files consist of versions that are identified by number and date/time of creation.

Team Foundation advances a concept that does not exist in Visual SourceSafe: changeset. A changeset is a logical container in which Team Foundation stores everything related to a single check-in operation: file and folder revisions, links to related work items, check-in notes, a check-in comment, and other information such as who submitted the change. For more information, see Working with Source Control Changesets.