Question

I know that in Visual SourceSafe you can go in and drill down to the history of an individual file and then drill down to an individual check-in and apply a comment to the check-in that way but that’s tedious and time consuming – if you have a lot of files that were checked in at the same time and you want the same comment to apply to all of them this will take forever.

I use the tool VSSReporter to generate reports of checkins and other stuff from VSS, but it cannot edit anything, only report on them.

Are there any tools which will let you go back and retroactively apply comments to check-ins in an efficient and easy manner?

Answer 1

While I did not find a program that can aid in this, I found the SourceSafe Command Line Reference and constructed a program that did the following:

1. Imported a tab-delimited file from VSSReporter which has the comments added via Excel

2. Created StringBuilder and added these lines

   set path=%path%;"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\"

   set ssdir=\\VSSServerName\VSSINIDirectory

3. For each entry in the file, add these lines to the StringBuilder (modifying verson number -V)

   ss cp "$/Path/to/project"

   ss Comment "FileToComment.cs" -C"Comment to apply to Version 1" -V1

4. Output StringBuilder to date/timestamped batch file.

5. Fire off batch file via a System.Diagnostics.Process, redirecting output to an identically date/timestamped text file.

I can’t share the code since I wrote it on my company’s dime but I thought I’d share the process anyway