VSS to SVN Migration

The last couple of weeks at work I've been moving our Source Control tool from Visual Source Safe (VSS) to Subversion (SVN). There are many reasons to move away from VSS, mainly it just sucks, random corruption, that nice error message about having to run the analyze tool, and just the fact that it is a very poor Microsoft Product. Also VSS doesn't support some of the features we want as we grow such as branching and merging.

There were other Source Control options we investigated when looking to migrate off of VSS, the most logical was to move to Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS), which I've heard is very robust and is an easy switch from VSS, it also apparently has some really nice features for controling Database Schema and Code (Stored Procedure) changes. The problem with TFS was, to work effectively (in addition to Costly TFS licensing) our Visual Studio Developers would have to upgrade to the Visual Studio Team System which is an additional cost. Our decision was to go open source, SVN is a very popular technology for Source Control and it supports many of our desired processes for Source Change Management, such as branching and merging releases.


Here are some helpful links for SVN and the conversion from VSS:
Good Overview of the Upgrade Process

Subversion Main Site

Tortoise SVN Client

VSS to SVN Migration Tool

TamTam SVN Visual Studio SCC Provider Plugin

Since we wanted to retain the check-in history from Visual Source Safe, we used the VSS to SVN Migration tool listed above. I made some modifications to the tool as well, I wanted to keep the user who originally made the change as well as the date the change was made (the 2nd version of the Migration tool just uses one sign-on to SVN and just uses the current computer time for the check-in time).

My change parses the user name out of the Version information from VSS and uses this login instead for SVN, it also parses the date and time the checkin was made, switches the computers clock to that date and time, and then finally does the commit to the SVN repository (which is on my local machine anyways because I couldn't get the the program to work on Windows 2003). I did run into some problems where on some files I couldn't get the versions from VSS for some reason, maybe these files were from a backup/restore in VSS and that is why it had trouble, I'm not sure but I was able to manually import the files that had this problem and the rest of the process completed smoothly.

Here is the direct link to my Modified Version of PowerAdmin's VSS to SVN Migration tool (I sent it to them, but in case they don't repost my version, here it is):
VSSMigrate3_code.zip

The next step was to move my local SVN repository to the final destination server, which can easily be done with the Subversion dump and load commands as described on this page:
How to move a Subversion Repository


Finally, I've setup backup scripts on the Subversion Windows 2003 Server, we had a similar set of backup batch file scripts running to backup our VSS database and FTP the backup file offsite. These batch files were then setup to be run nightly and weekly via the windows scheduler. The new Subversion backup batch files perform a svnadmin hotcopy to make a copy of the repository without taking it offline, then it zip compresses the files from the hotcopy using the 7zip program's command line arguments, it finally creates a remote ftp script that is executed to ftp the compressed backupfiles offsite. Here are the contents of my fancy batch file backup script for Subversion:



FOR /F "tokens=1 delims= " %%i IN ('date /t') DO SET DATE=%%i

cd C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\

RMDIR /S /Q D:\backup\SVN\current\
MKDIR D:\backup\SVN\current\

DEL D:\backup\SVN\%DATE%_SVN_backup.zip

svnadmin hotcopy D:\svn_repo D:\backup\SVN\current --clean-logs

"C:\Program Files\7-zip\7z" a -tzip -r -y d:\backup\SVN\%DATE%_SVN_backup.zip d:\backup\SVN\current

cd D:\backup\SVN\

> script.ftp ECHO username
>>script.ftp ECHO password
>>script.ftp ECHO cd ~/backup/SVN
>>script.ftp ECHO binary
>>script.ftp ECHO prompt n
>>script.ftp ECHO mput %DATE%_SVN_backup.zip
>>script.ftp ECHO quit
:: Use the temporary script for unattended FTP
FTP -v -s:script.ftp ftp.servername.com




After that developers must rebind their Solutions to SVN, which can be quite a pain, but once it's setup using TamTam, going forward it is smooth opening the solution files.
One tool that helped me out upgrade the solutions (especially VS2003) was Clean Sources Plus which removes source control bindings from the windows explorer right click menu.

ASP.NET Web Application Project Upgrade - Assembly Reference not found

We've recently undergone a conversion to Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) for the new Web Application Projects (WAP) they have added.

The Web Application Projects give more control over the files included in a Web Site because now you have a project file similar to the VS 2003 Web Application model.

There are a couple of nice guides online to upgrading a Web Site to a Web Application Project after installing SP1, here is one I followed for the Upgrade:
Scott Gu's Migrating a Web Site to Web Application Project.

Basically, you just create a new web application project, copy in all your pages and other files, then on all the ASPX pages, right click and choose "Convert to Web Application", which creates the filename.designer.cs files necessary for the new Web Application Model.

To simplify the upgrade initially I didn't add namespaces for the separate App_Code files and I just put them in a folder named "Classes".

After that there weren't many more hoops to jump through for the site to successfully compile.

One reason for the upgrade is to make it easier to create a Web Setup (Installer) for the Web Application Projects where making a Setup Project for the original "Web Site" project was a pain.

After creating the Web Setup Project for our Web Application Project, then testing the installer, I kept getting an error:
"The name 'Namespace' does not exist in the current context"
When I viewed the detailed compiler output: "The type or namespace name 'Namespace' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)". This was because the dll files for the website were not in the bin folder underneath the web application root folder.

Once I fixed this in the installer (I manually added the bin folder available from the "View -> File System" context menu, and added outputs: Primary Output for each web project and library as necessary).

Overall, I'm much happier with the new (or old) Web Application Projects model in Visual Studio 2005, it gives the developer much more control over the behavior of the website, the included files, simplifies deployment, and is much faster to compile and test.

Read Foreign Region DVD

I recently got back from a 3 week vacation to Spain and Italy, while I was over there we ran out of space on our camera xD drives so we went to an Internet Cafe in Italy and had them burn a DVD of our pictures that were on our 2 GB xD card. After that I nervously formatted that card so that we could continue taking pictures of our trip.

Once I got back to the States and started compiling all our photos (over 2000 of them!) I insert my DVD with my photos into my computer's DVD drive and I hear it clicking and thrashing and my heart drops into my stomach.

When my DVD ROM couldn't read the disk I paniked, I tried to keep my calm; telling myself it was alright, the files were there, I just had to get them off it.

After much searching online for a solution, I realized the problem was my DVD-ROM was the 2nd generation computer DVD Player with this Movie Industry Region protection so the movie industry can control releases of movies within different countries. What a crock!!!

Luckily I was able to find a firmware upgrade tool that allows my model of DVD Rom to be essentially Region-Less (or region 0) so the DVD player doesn't care what region the DVD is actually encoded for.

After I upgraded the Firmware and used this DVD Region Killer s/w to remove the region protection from windows I could finally read my dvd and use windows to get my photos off of it.

Note: do not leave a foreign region DVD in the drive on bootup or you are bound to get hangs as the O/S looks at the drive to boot from.