Git, invented in 2005. Programmers on 2004:
Git, invented in 2005. Programmers on 2004:
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.
Visual SourceSafe
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!
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.