Over the years I have used SourceSafe, CVS, Subversion and some Borland thing I can't remember the name of (I've bloack it out as a traumatic experience). This week I have been working with a new developer and I have been trying to share my Source code with them. Since I've been working on Solo Agile projects recently I have been using SourceSafe 2005. I have always find it to be fast and stable and I have never had any problems with it.
The challenge was then to get the SourceSafe 2005 database visible over the Internet. Out first attempt was to use SourceOffSite from SourceGear. We quickly excluded this option as the technical requirements show that it is not compatible with Windows Server 2008 64 bit edition.
We also tried to get a VPN working on Windows Server 2008 using SSTP, but failed. It may have to do with the mobile network we were using to try to connect. We struggled to get this to work and we could not get a sensible error message out of either server or client!
So we moved on to the SourceSafe 2005 HTTP extension. We spent a couple of hours trying to get this to work and ultimately failed. For no explicable reason we could not get the SourceSafe web service to work. By this point we were tearing our hair out!
So we turned to our third option which was migrating the source code to a different system. Jon suggested that we look at VisualSVN. I have avoided Subversion recently as I have primarily been an ASP.Net developer. The last time I used Subversion, it was not possible to connect the HTTP interface via IIS. However, VisualSVN contains client and server components which address this. The server portion contains an HTTP server which solves my problem.
It took about ten minutes to set up and install the server software and Visual Studio client software. It took another 10 minutes to clean up the SourceSafe source code repository and get it into Subversion. The whole thing worked over the Internet via SSL with no drama at all!
So, my recommendation for you guys out there in a similar situation is to take a good look at Visual SVN!