VSS to TFS Source Control migration

Team Foundation Server (commonly abbreviated TFS) is a Microsoft offering for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, intended for collaborative software development projects. It is available either as stand-alone software, or as the server side backend platform for Visual Studio Team System(VSTS).

As Visual Source Safe is targeted towards individual developers or small teams with lightweight SCM needs, Microsoft is encouraging everyone else to migrate to the more sophisticated Team Foundation system.

There's a command line tool provided by TFS 2005 to migrate from VSS to TFS and is called VssConverter . The VSSConverter.exe is located in :\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE and is also available through the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt.

Due differences between this two technologies VSS historical information cannot be migrated. Basically, TFS source control does not support Sharing and Pinning. Because of this, Sharing, Branching (Sharing is a pre-condition of Branching) and Pinning historical information is lost when migrating to TFS source control.

Also, time stamps and source control bindings are not migrated.

Despite this limitations VssConverter.exe does a great job but it requires a lot of XML configuration.

The VSS Converter requires Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 2005 or a later version to run.