This section contains information about how to plan to migrate your Visual SourceSafe source control projects to Team Foundation source control. The migration process is time-consuming because you are migrating years of source control data. The converter provides migration options that can minimize the time to migrate by either reducing the migration time or enabling your teams to work on source control during the migration. Evaluate which of the following migration options will work best for your team:

• Project-by-Project migration   Use this option to migrate the sources of one team or project at a time; typically one folder in Visual SourceSafe . This option makes sure that other teams are not blocked during migration; however, if two teams have dependencies between their sources, you should migrate the sources of both teams, that is project folders, together. The two folders may have some dependencies that could cause data loss if only some of the folders are migrated. The analysis phase helps identify the dependencies between folders.

• Incremental Migration   Use this option to migrate your Visual SourceSafe database in phases. Migrating a Visual SourceSafe database in phases ensures that users can continue to use Visual SourceSafe while migration is in progress. For more information, see How to: Incrementally Migrate to Team Foundation

• Use Archive feature of VSS to migrate partial history   Use this option if you are not interested in migrating old history. By using this feature you remove the version history of file and folder before a specific date. For more information, see How to: Migrate a Partial History Using Archives in Visual SourceSafe.

In the second phase, you do analysis of the Visual SourceSafe database under migration and in phase two, you do the actual migration of the Visual SourceSafe database to Team Foundation source control. The analysis phase generates a report that gives you information about potential data loss during migration. You can prevent some of the potential data loss by taking some pre migration steps; however, some data loss cannot be prevented because some Visual SourceSafe data cannot be mapped to Team Foundation source control. After migration, you receive a report that gives you information about status and any data loss during migration. Post migration, you may have to do some steps to make sure that you can use the migrated sources

After migrating source control successfully, you should verify that the sources have been migrated to Team Foundation source control. After a successful migration, you should see whether there are differences between the latest versions of files and folders in Visual SourceSafe to the latest versions of the migrated sources in Team Foundation source control using any file comparison utility such as the WinDiff tool. If you find differences between the files, folders or their versions, you should migrate the latest version manually. This mean you have to add some files manually which are not present in Team Foundation and delete the ones which are not present in VSS. Some of these problems are due to VSS corruption issues, some are due to  scenarios which cannot be taken care off by converter and Team Foundation issues.

Note
You always find some extra files on the Visual SourceSafe side with the extension *.*scc. These files are temporary files generated by Visual SourceSafe in your local folder when you use a get command for the latest in Visual SourceSafe . The extra files are not source files.

We have generally noticed that VSS converter takes approx. 0.123+ sec per action. Hence you can roughly estimate the migration time after analysis phase. You will get the number of actions analyzed in the analysis report.

Please note that migration time depends number of actions, the machine configuration, network settings. Hence you may see different migration time per action in your set up.

Here is the quick introduction of who I am and what I do for living. I am Program Manager in Team Foundation Team and I am owner of migration tool that will migrate your sources from VSS to Team Foundation. I write specs in addition to fight with my developers and QA. So if I am missing from my cubicle with no traces, you know who are at blameJ.

I was planning to get back on blogging since I posted my last blog at the time of Beta2. Now Beta3 provided an excellent opportunity to jump on Team Foundation blogging wagon. First choice of blogging is no-brainer “VSS Converter”.

Here is a writeup on how you must plan and execute you migration Planning for Migration from VSS to Team Foundation.

Check out following articles by my other team members that will help you in migration process and understanding about VSS Converter.

Ankur has discussed some interesting facts about VSS converter design.

Check out Nagendra's blog for post migration steps.

Check a separate section of my blog for other VSS Converter related discussion.

Stay tuned to read more about VSS Converter. Post your questions on VSS Converter  on Visual Studio Team System General  or Visual Studio Team Foundation Forums

 or contact me at akashm at microsoft.com.

Thanks,

-Akash