Since our comapny is distributed, we need some remote VSS access tool to help us deal with work on Internet. I have surfed and found out various kinds of remote VSS tools, which seem to be what we need. So, I don't know which one is better. I saw an article making comparison among several VSS remote tools on the market as seen below.
It seems that SourceAnyWhere is much better than others. Has anyone used it? Is that true?
Any suggestion is appreciated, please help me. It is urgent for our company.Tks
Regards, Junicv
A comparison among six VSS remote tools including SourceOffSite , SourceAnyWhere, VSS Connect, SourceXT, VSS Remoting, VSS.NET
This article makes a detailed comparison among SourceAnyWhere 4.0, SourceOffSite 4.1, VSS Connect 1.5, SourceXT 2.1, VSS Remoting 2.5, VSS.NET 1.67
Keywords: VSS Remote Access, VSS Web Access, VSS Internet Access, SourceSafe Remote Access, SourceSafe Web Access, SourceSafe Internet Access, SourceAnyWhere, SourceOffSite, VSS Connect, SourceXT, VSS Remoting, VSS.NET
1. Overview
What does the article do? It makes a comparison among: SourceAnyWhere 4.0 SourceOffSite 4.1 VSS Connect 1.5 SourceXT 2.1 VSS Remoting 2.5 VSS.NET 1.67
Our initiative is to make an unbiased, objective, repeatable and verifiable comparison: a. Real project is used. The project I use is eMule, which is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/emule/ b. Detailed steps are presented. You can follow the detailed steps easily. c. If you want to make a comment, I can be reached at bettervssremoting@yahoo.com.
If you need more info, please visit their official websites:
The real result may vary if you do the test in different environment or different files are used. However, the basic concept of this comparison, such as which one is the fastest, which one has more VSS features, should be applicable everywhere.
Speed: I am totally surprised and excited by the speed of SourceAnyWhere. For some operations, SourceAnyWhere can be up to 40+ times faster than other five products.
Stability: SourceAnyWhere never has any problem in the whole test.
SourceOffSite has several problems when it comes to stability. The big problem of SourceOffSite is cancel. There is no cancel support in IDE integration. After a cancel operation in Add, Checkin, Checkout or Get in SourceOffSite Explorer, the CPU usage of SourceOffSite server goes up to almost 100% and can not come down, unless the server is restarted. VSS Connect and SourceXT also have problems in stability. On big file operations, they are very possible to crash. But both two have a good handling of Cancel. And, VSS crashes every time when I try adding a special directory such as "c:\" and "My Computer".
VSS Remoting has difficulty to add file and it fails to operate on big files.
VSS.NET has problems in big file operation during the whole test. And it cannot handle the Cancel operations.
Security: What makes SourceAnyWhere unique is the password policy.
SourceAnyWhere, SourceOffSite and VSS Connect use 128-bit cryptography.
SourceOffSite and SourceAnyWhere use BlowFish. . VSS Remoting uses HTTPS.
VSS Feature Support: Most of the six products support ordinary VSS features such as Add, Get, Checkin, Checkout and so on. However, only SourceAnyWhere has a detailed and full support for almost all of VSS features. Except SourceAnyWhere, all the products does not have supports for EOL (end-of-line). Different OS use different end-of-line characters in text files. Without EOL support, text files got to local may not be read correctly. For example, in Rational the EOL character is /n but in Windows it is "/r/n". When getting a text file from Rational to Windows without a support for EOL, the text will not be displayed normally.
SourceXT, VSS Remoting and VSS.Net have no support for Pin. Assuming a file is pinned in VSS Server, then what if Pin is not supported? First, the pinned file can still be checked out by Client, which is a great danger to the pinned file. Second, when performing a get, the most recent version will be got, not the pinned version. This can probably cause version confusion.
SourceAnyWhere has a Server-base time zone offset option, others dont. In my opinion, it is very important to synchronize Server time and Client time. Imagine this, the Server time is 10 hours ahead of Client time. When you edit a file and check it in at 2/23 9:00PM (Client time), but on the Server side, time of this version reads 2/24 7:00AM. So in the future when you need to get version of 2/23 9:00PM actually, you may mistakenly get another version.
Usability: SAW is the best. All the Windows of SAW is in Win32 style. It can detect if a file is changed automatically.
Diff/Merge In File Diff (2-way)/File Merge (3-way), SourceAnyWhere and SourceOffSite run neck and neck; VSS Remoting has a low performance
IDE Integration: SourceAnyWhere, SourceOffSite and VSS Remoting all support MSSCCI Integration. VSS Remoting supports DreamWeaver integration
I have not tested the IDE integration intensively. I give this rate just according to manual of the three products.
Cross Platform: Besides its Windows client, SAW has a Java client built on JDK 1.4.2, so that it can cross any platform where JDK can run such as Linux, Mac, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO Unix and FreeBSD. SourceOffSite can cross Linux and Mac OS X.
VSS Remoting has a web interface which can login server through web.
3. Test Environment
Test Data
Real project is used for test All eMule0.44c and eMule0.44d files are downloaded from Sourceforge Download eMule0.44c (3.1M) and eMule0.44d (3.1M) used in the test Big Files are simulated files created by us
Server Configuration
P4, 2.8G, 256M RAM, Windows XP Professional SourceAnyWhere profession 4.0 DEMO Server SourceOffSite4.1 with Cryptography DEMO Server VSS Connect Server 1.5 SourceXT Server 2.1 VSS Remoting Server 2.5 VSS.NET Server 1.67 Visual SourceSafe6.0 + Sp6 Client Configuration
Hi, I'm from Ecuador, our company has purchased SourceAnyWhere after 30 days of testing. Let me tell you taht it really works fine and fast. Our partners are located in Puerto Rico and from that we use the same sourcesafe database located here in Ecuador. i strongly recommend you sourceanywhere!!.
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