Question

Visual Studio 2008, to be more specific. We’re testing out moving to Perforce for source control, so I’d like to install the P4SCC plugin to monkey around with. However, I’d also like to continue using SourceSafe’s IDE capabilities for projects that haven’t been moved over yet. Can the two co-exist peacefully, or is it one or the other for a specific install of VS?

Answer 1

Yes, Visual Studio supports multiple providers. The entire VS architecture is plugin based, and SCC providers are just another kind of plugin (usually implemented as a “package,” in VS terminology).

You can only have one SCC provider active at a time. So you cannot have different projects bound to different providers within the same solution.

The active SCC provider can be switched by:

• Going to Tools -> Options -> Source Control (present as of VS 2005) -or-
• Using a tool like SccSwitcher to modify the registry directly (needed on VS 2003 and earlier)
• Opening a solution that already has SCC bindings written into it

You cannot change the provider from within the Bind dialog (File -> Source Control -> Change SCC). All you can do there is bind/unbind, or in the case of a few odd providers like SourceSafe, edit the server path.

To change the provider of an existing solution you would use the Bind dialog to remove the existing bindings, change the active provider from Tools -> Options (or SCCSwitcher if needed), then launch the Add Solution To Source Control wizard from Solution Explorer.