Setting Up Source Control on a Web Server

See Also

To install Microsoft® Visual SourceSafe™ and set it up to work with Microsoft® Visual InterDev™, you need to complete several procedures using a couple of different interfaces.

The first step involves installing Visual SourceSafe on the master Web server using Microsoft® Windows® and Visual SourceSafe Setup.

To set up source control on your Web server

  1. Install Visual SourceSafe on the master Web server. For more information, see Installing Visual SourceSafe on a Web Server later in this topic.

  2. In Visual SourceSafe, grant Visual SourceSafe permission to users. For more information, see "To grant permissions to a user" later in this topic.

  3. For Web servers on Microsoft® Windows NT®, add permissions to the anonymous user account. For more information, see "To add permissions for the Anonymous user account" later in this topic.

  4. Share source control between Web projects.

Installing Visual SourceSafe on a Web Server

When installing Visual SourceSafe, be sure to install the Visual SourceSafe server on same computer as the master Web server. Make sure the option for integration with other visual products is selected. Without that option set, Visual SourceSafe runs independently and does not recognize the commands used by Visual InterDev.

If you plan to check files in and out from within Visual InterDev, you don't need to install the Visual SourceSafe client on your local computer.

The following procedure assumes you have Microsoft® Internet Information Server and FrontPage® Server Extensions already installed on your master Web server.

To install Visual SourceSafe on the master Web server

  1. Run the Visual SourceSafe setup program.

  2. Choose Custom and make sure that you are installing at least the following components:
  3. If you are running Windows 95 and Microsoft® Personal Web Server, download and install the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).

If you need to download the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), go to the Microsoft corporate Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/search/default.asp and search for "DCOM."

After you've installed Visual SourceSafe on a Web server, you must grant read/write permissions to all users whom you want to be able to author files using Visual InterDev or Microsoft FrontPage.

To grant permissions to a user

  1. Run the Visual SourceSafe Administrator application. This application should appear in the Programs section of the Start menu. If it doesn't, check that you installed all of the components listed above.

  2. Select the Users menu and then choose Add User.

  3. Enter the user's name and, if desired, leave the Password box blank. Make sure the Read-Only option is not selected.

    Note   If you assign a password, the user will have an additional login step to complete when using the project.

In addition to granting read/write permissions to specific users, if you have installed Visual SourceSafe on a Windows NT server, you must also add permissions for the Anonymous user account.

To add permissions for the Anonymous user account

  1. On the server, open Internet Information Manager.

  2. In the Microsoft Management Console, choose Internet Information Server, and then select the computer that is running the Visual Source Safe Administrator.

  3. Select Default Web Site and open its properties dialog box.

  4. On the Directory Security tab, choose Edit to change the Authentication Methods.

  5. In the Anonymous User Account dialog box, copy the user name.

Note   By default, this property setting is IUSR_machinename, where machinename is the name of the server where you have installed the Visual SourceSafe Administrator.

  1. In the Visual SourceSafe Administrator application, create a user account for the Anonymous user by choosing Add User from the Users menu and pasting in the value of the UserName property. Leave the Password box blank and make sure that the Read-Only option is not selected.

When Visual SourceSafe tracks changes, it uses the operating system to identify and record who made the changes.

Certain operating systems can only recognize and record the anonymous user name for changes. If your Web server is running Windows 95, or Windows NT using the File Allocation Tables (FAT) file system, then all files checked out through Visual SourceSafe will always be checked out to the same user account. This user account might not represent the user performing the operation.

On a Windows NT FAT system, the anonymous user account performs all source control operations on the server. On a Windows 95 system, the user account specified when Windows 95 was started performs all source control operations on the server.