Chris May

Somehow the term ALT.NET has been created to describe people who use .Net to program, but try to avoid the "standard" practices and tools that microsoft pushes.

Roy Osherove has an article where he pits the HOT and NOT as seen by the alt.net guys.

My major issue with trying to adopt more of these practices is that I work mostly on existing large applications.

I can't just show up at a client who already has millions of LOC using a more standard approach with thousands of stored procedures, and jump into a Monorail/NHibernate project.

For now I am focusing on getting one of my clients using a server based build and deployment.  We have already moved off of VSS, which is making a big difference in our productivity.

The VSSConverter tool which allows you to convert from VSS to TFS will attempt to utilize a local version of SQL Express.

This sucks, as I hate SQL Express.

After some searching/trials/errors, I found a way to get it to work against a SQL Server 2005 database.

Just add the SQL tag to your migration settings xml file like so:

<Source name="VSS">

      <VSSDatabase name="D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\VSSHttp"></VSSDatabase>

      <UserMap name="D:\VSS2TeamFoundation\Usermap.xml"></UserMap>

      <SQL Server="name_of_your_SQL_Server" />

</Source>

In previous versions of VS.Net you could take a project and go File->Source Control->Add Selected Project To Source Control and you could simply add the project to your VSS provider.

Now in VS.Net 2005 (maybe caused by VSS 2005, or VSS 2005 over HTTP), if you follow this route you will end up with File->Source Control->Add Project to Source Control, and your project will be added with the following path:

$\MyProject.root\MyProject.

Thanks VSS, thanks a lot.  I really needed that .root in there.

To get around this problem, just add another existing project to VS.Net (creating a solution).  Now highlight the actual project you want to add and do:

File->Source Control->Add Selected Project to Source Control and all will be wonderful.