jinfeng_wang

Recently I was tasked to share/branch a complex source tree in Visual SourceSafe 6.0 to do some changes with our project. For some reason, I found it very hard to do and I kept getting this error:

What the heck does "A project cannot be shared under a descendant" mean? After some testing, it turns out the reason for this error is because VSS attempts to add the folder you specified to itself. That is why this is a recursive error: you are adding a folder to the folder you are recursively scanning. I tried specifying a path (ie. $/ProjectA-Copied), but it refuses to recognize the full path and keeps wanting to add to itself ($/ProjectA/ProjectA-Copied). For the life of me, I just couldn't get VSS to share to another location.

After asking around some people, Paul (thanks!) told me that the problem is when you select Share on a project (aka folder) in VSS Explorer, you are selecting the destination project, not the source. Boy... great user experience isn't it?

Armed with this key piece of knowledge, I created my destination project, selected Share on the destination project, in the share dialog selected the source project, and finally was able to successfully share that source project to the destination project.

Also if you are branching after sharing and you have a project with lots of files, I recommend you use the Branch after share check box:

If you share without branching in one step, then you will have to manually go into the destination project and branch all the files individually. Nope, you cannot branch on the project level!

And finally, yes we're using Visual SourceSafe, yes I know it sucks, and finally (what I'm most happy about) yes we will be moving to Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Suite!