MS Sourcesafe and LabVIEW

[DarkLordOfG]

I am trying to get sourcesafe setup with MS Visual Sourcesafe. A couple of question that I wonder if people have dealt with:

1. It appears that LabVIEW uses one main project folder specification in the sourcesafe setup for all the projects. Is there anyway to have project specific source control setup or is this a global LV development setting? For example I want project applications to point to the project folder in MS Sourcesafe and Utitility applications to point to the utility project folder in Sourcesafe (Utility is not part of the root project folder)

2. Anyone have any suggestions on how to "share" vi's libraries and the such successfully into a LV project?

John

[smercurio_fc]

Answer to (1): This is global. You can't change it on a per-project basis.

As for (2): Not clear what you mean by this. Is this in conjunction with SourceSafe? Or do you just want to reference VIs in a "central" location from within your project? If so, you just need to drag-and-drop the folder onto your project. The project is just a convenient container for all your VIs. The Vis will get loaded based on the physical locations.

[DarkLordOfG]

As far as (2) goes I have a large "shared" library that I keep in user.lib. I like to keep them there because they show up automatically in the palettes. I want to be able to drag and drop the user.lib into my project AND be able to checkout the files from a central location in visual sourcesafe. Sourcesafe allows you to "share" files between projects. How do I synchronize the two? If I drag the user.lib into the project it wants to add the files to sourcesafe under the project. If I have three LV projects all using the same user.lib I want them pointing to the same place in sourcesafe. I am not sure how to do that.

[smercurio_fc]

Neither am I, and based on what I've seen as far as the source control implementation, I don't think you can do that, though perhaps someone at NI knows?

I would suggest using the SourceSafe client outside of LabVIEW, and turn off source control integration from within LabVIEW. That's what I did when I used SourceSafe.

As an aside: you don't need to keep the files in a user.lib file in order for the files to show up in the palette. You can edit the palette and insert a subpalette that is a link to a directory. That way you don't have to keep the files in an .LLB file, which is evil. Well, that's an overstatement, but LLBs have their problems, not the least of which is that if one VI in the library gets corrupted, then the whole library is corrupted.

[gmart]

The "share" feature of Visual SourceSafe is considered an advanced option and is not directly supported via the source control integration in LabVIEW. So the behavior you are seeing seems correct. LabVIEW believes, based on the source control configuration, that the "shared" files are not under source control so it asks you if you want to add them.

As has been said, the source control options in LabVIEW are global so only one SourceSafe project is configurable.

[Tomi_Maila]

Do not use SourceSafe as it's not safe 🙂 There is a risk of data corruption in the long run and in large projects. Microsoft is discarding this technology and moving to better working products.

Many LabVIEW users have good experience of using SVN (Subversion) with LabVIEW. I guess it's the way to go.

Tomi

[gmart]

Some web articles about the future of SourceSafe:

http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2004/05/28/144182.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302175.aspx