Removing SourceSafe Integration from Visual Studio 6

Question

Recently, the SourceSafe integration into visual studio has started to perform badly because we have moved, and the SourceSafe "server" is located across a VPN which goes across a slow connection. This has made loading large projects in visual c++ 6 take 5+ minutes because it has to talk to the "server" for each project. Also, there are some bugs that are dangerous in the integration (the auto-checkout of certain shared projects will do a get latest on the wrong version of a branched file). This has caused me to want to disable the SourceSafe integration, however I have not found any menu option or uninstall option. Google has reported a few registry tweaks, but none of them seemed to work.

Does anyone know of an easy way to remove the SourceSafe integration from Visual C++ 6, without uninstalling SourceSafe altogether?

Rosanarosane

Answer 1

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236399:

Source code control software, such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, that integrates with the Visual C++ integrated development environment (IDE) can be configured to connect to a source code server during Visual C++ startup. In such cases, a loss in network connectivity will cause Visual C++ to start up very slowly. To improve performance, either ensure proper network connectivity or disable the source code control software integration with the Visual C++ IDE. To do the latter, quit Visual C++, and then use RegEdit.Exe to locate the following registry key and set its Disabled value to (DWORD) 0x00000001:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled

I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.

Rosanarosane

Yes, you should NOT have a Visual Studio (VC6) running when you make the change. It re-writes the settings to the registry when it exits, overwriting your changes. – Farce

Thank you! I was not able to load my VC++ 6 project. It would error out on initializing source control system and exit. – Gomes

Answer 2

Open the .dsp and .dsw file in a text editor, and remove the respective entries from the .dsp and the .dsw file. Also, delete the .scc files.

Backstop

Answer 3

There is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article about how to do exactly this.

The gist of it is that you must manually edit the .dsw and .dsp files in a text editor, and remove a few other files lying around. See the article for more details.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

Aside from the fact that there are about 120 .dsp files in the project, I don't necessarily want to remove it for other people, just remove the tool from my copy of visual studio (like it did before I enabled the integration) – Rosanarosane

Answer 4

If the solutions mentioned above fail for you do this:

Rename folder: \Program Files\Microsoft\%vs%\Common7\IDE\VS SCC

VS will complain once about plug in not being there and you say "Yes" to ignore it in perpetuity.

All files “got latest,” “read only,” and edited in VS, will make VS complain and offer to “override”, which works fine for me.

What do you gain:

• Open VSS-linked solutions quickly without VS matching contents to VSS server.

• Open VSS-linked solutions and EDIT the files at will without being bogged down in “check out” bs.

• This makes using other distributed source control system on top of project tree with VSS bindings painless.

• VSS client still works by itself just fine, including diff, checkout, checkin.

Councillor

tried this and it still asks to remove every time i open the solution. is there possibly a step missing? – Gazpacho

Answer 5

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.

Its working .....Thanks Ajay

Straightlaced

Answer 6

What has worked for us, and is much easier, requires no registry/file editing by hand, and safer I think is this:

1) Exit Visual Studio completely.

2) Disconnect from the network (unplug the cable and turn off wireless, or disable the network adapters)

3) Open the VS6 workspace (DSW) for the project. When it starts up it will find it cannot connect with the VSS database it wants to and ask you about that...

4) Tell VS to never try to reconnect to the source control db in the future.

5) Done... VS does all the changes to THAT WORKSPACE/PROJECT setup for you. You are not disconnecting VS from source control in general (like a registry edit would do) and your not manually editing files.

Conservancy