I’ve been told time and time again that Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe 6.0 is not a very good application to use for managing project files, but it’s all I have and it has been working pretty well… until today.   One of my project folders apparently got corrupt; I couldn’t open the folder, delete it, rename it… nuttin’.

After trying a gazillion stupid things just short of creating a whole new VSS database and starting over, I finally discovered the ANALYZE command line tool.  Sure enough, that’s all I needed to fix the corrupted database.  The analyze tool is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VSS\win32 folder.

Running the following command was all I had to do to fix the problematic folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VSS\win32>ANALYZE –F \\server\vss\dbname\data

Here is a list of a few other VSS Utilities. Since I now know how to repair a corrupt VSS database, I’m going to continue to ignore everyone’s advice and keep using VSS in the hopes that the 2005 version will be a cure-all (yah right!) J