Looking to migrate your existing Visual Source Safe (VSS) projects to MS Team Foundation Server (TFS)? Thankfully, there are a number of options available, should you plan to do a “straight” migration (meaning, take what you have in VSS and replicate it in TFS). Migrating to TFS, however, does present an opportunity to evaluate how you utilized VSS and how you may do it differently.

There are a number of aspects to consider when reflecting on how VSS was used and how you’ll utilize TFS going forward:

  • Were all your software assets stored in VSS?
    • If they weren’t, why not? Should they be?
  • Did you use a branching/tagging scheme?
    • VSS had issues here– is this fact causing you to overlook how you’ll address these features going forward in TFS?
  • What directory structure did you use for VSS projects?
    • Was this structure effective and consistent across projects?

Before you indiscriminately take what’s in VSS and migrate it to TFS, take some time to carefully consider what aspects of your utilization of VSS worked and which didn’t and then carefully map a path that exploits the positive aspects of your process within the Team System platform.

Resources for migrating to TFS from VSS: