Setting up SCCBridge
| Comments Thanks for visiting! Just a fair warning this post is fairly 'old' in tech terms and may contain outdated information and/or broken links or pictures. Please verify info and feel free to contact me if questions!
Installing SCCBridge requires several components.
For the server:
- SCCBridge Server
- Visual Source Safe - get from your Microsoft representative
- IIS5 or greater
- .NET Framework 1.1
- Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0
For the client
- SCCBridge Client (IDE Integration)
- SCCBridge Client (Repository Explorer only)
Steps to set it up:
- First ensure your web server is installed with the latest security patches and IIS updates (obviously, but it had to be said).
- Ensure that .NET 1.1 is installed on your web server (if Windows 2003, make sure that the IIS installation had the "Enable ASP.NET" checked).
- Install the WSE 2.0 on the web server. It is only necessary to install the runtime library (option during setup), but you can install other WSE add-ons as well, however, only the runtime is required.
- Install Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (recommended 6d).
- Create the VSS database on the web server (or if your VSS is on a different server install it there and remember the UNC share -- you may have additional security items to enable a remote server) and remember the path.
- Install the SCCBridge server on the web server. By default this installs to the default web site in a /BridgeServer virtual root, but you can change this.
- After installing SCCBridge, go to the location of the install and edit the web.config. You will have to change the RepositoryPath application setting to be the path to your srcsafe.ini file for your VSS database.
- Since ASP.NET is acting as the "user" to access the VSS database, you must ensure that read/write access is given to the appropriate user account to the "data" and "user" directories of your VSS database location. NOTE: if you are planning on using some other form of authentication and ASPNET will not be the user, ensure appropriate access is granted.
- That completes the installation for the server.
- On your client, if it is a Visual Studio.NET user, I recommend only installing the SCCBridge client IDE integration. It will integrate with VS.NET but also installs the RepositoryExplorer anyway so you would have installed both effectively.
- After installing the client, the source control provider registers itself as "Remote access to version control system" -- not a very helpful description. I recommend changing that either through a manual registry change or deploying a .reg file. The path at HKLM\Software\SourceCodeControlProvider\InstalledSCCProviders has the entry marked. You can either remove that one, or add a new string value with the same value as the current, but give it a more descriptive name like "VSSBridge" or something like that.
- Initially I've found that if you only use the IDE integration, it doesn't remember the last entered URL for your bridge server...this can be a pain in the neck sometimes, so I editing the RepositoryExplorer.config.xml (located in the SCCBridge client installation directory) file and change the DefaultServiceURL parameter to your URL.
- That's it! Your clients can now access your VSS repository over the internet (assuming you have appropriate firewall/proxy/whatever rules in place and the users know their logins).
I hope you find this useful.
Please enjoy some of these other recent posts...
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