Last weekend, we completed the switch over to SourceGear Vault. Not being able to stand the abysmal VSS any longer (we threw out the 2005 update as quickly as it came in), we bought five licenses for Vault and migrated the entire VSS during the May 1st long weekend.

Apart from a few strange quirks, the import worked very well. The entire database of 10-15 GB was imported straight into Vault with complete history, although it took almost four days to complete.

I must say, Vault has exceeded my expectations. It is super-fast, allows you to see exactly what’s in the repository and how it matches your local files in the same view, it’s a breeze to work with and it’s powerful. I’m sure there’s a lot of features to learn, but so far, it’s a large step up from VSS and it performs almost exactly the same – just blazingly fast (allowing us poor developers working remote to breathe again). In my view, everyone should be running Vault instead of VSS.

The Vault API is also powerful. The command line client is provided as open source, meaning that you use the same .NET assemblies as the client does. No more buggy VSS automation.

The only side-effect so far is that we had to upgrade to FinalBuilder 4, otherwise we couldn’t check out entire projects in one go for our build scripts.