Category Archives: SourceSafe

Microsoft’s proprietary source code control system, and subject of the book “Essential SourceSafe” by Ted Roche.

OpenOffice.org security flaws identified, some patched

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Robert McMillan of InfoWorld: Top News reports OpenOffice.org security 'insufficient'. “With Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses… “The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient,” the researchers wrote in a paper entitled “In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents.” … “This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks,” they wrote.”

Despite the negative tone of the beginning of this article, it's more good news for OO.o than bad. First, the one major flaw that was found has been patched – yeah, Open Source! – and you'll want to ensure you're running the latest OpenOffice.org. The second positive spin of the article is the tone: governments and companies are seriously evaluating OpenOffice.org as a replacement for their current office products. I wonder if this change in the tone has to do with the acceptance of the Office Document Format as a recognized international standard.

SourceSafe History Redux: using VFP to generate VSS History Files

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In the original post, I showed a simple Visual FoxPro program to generate a week’s worth of activity history from Visual SourceSafe. Andrew MacNeill observed that it would not work for him, as he was supporting more than one database. Here’s one solution: change the original program from shelling out with a single command. Instead, generate a batch file, and then execute it. Here’s a sample:


SET TEXTMERGE TO VSSHIST.BAT
SET TEXTMERGE ON NOSHOW
\ SET SSDIR=C:\MY DOCUMENTS\SOURCESAFE
\ SET VSSEXEDIR=C:\PROGRAM FILES\VSS\WIN32
\ %VSSEXEDIR%\ss history $/ -R -vd <<DTOC(DATE())>>~<<DTOC(DATE()-7)>>  -B -O@History.txt
SET TEXTMERGE OFF
SET TEXTMERGE TO
!VSSHIST.BAT
SET SSDIR=
SET VSSExeDir=

[UPDATED]: My blogging software made mincemeat out of the slashes, greater-than and less-than signs. Copy with care, and proof your result.

The SSDIR environment variable is recognized the the SS.EXE SourceSafe command-line executable: if set, it points to the SRCSAFE.INI file and the location of the data files SourceSafe is to operate on. The second environment variable, VSSExeDir is one I use to simplify the batch file, but putting the absolute path to the SourceSafe executables in one place, you can refer to it within the file, and only need to change it in one place should you change paths. Think #DEFINE in other languages.

Follow-up: weekly SourceSafe history reports

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Andrew follows up on my 30 June post on Ted Roche – Building SourceSafe Activity Reports using VFP. “Ted hasn’t updated this yet but his code for generating weekly activity reports from Visual SourceSafe is going to help me out plenty… We had to make some adjustments for databases that are not stored in the root directory (mine are stored in another folder).”

Well, actually, the problem is that the code as written in the original post assumed that the SourceSafe client on the machine running the report was set up to point to the repository of SourceSafe data by default – an obscure registry setting. If not, use the trick in Andrew’s post to set the SSDIR environment variable to point to the SourceSafe repository of interest. Also, it’s a very good idea to run this on the local machine with the SourceSafe repository, as network traffic can slow the performance by orders of magnitude. Andrew goes on to note:

“By the way, Ted’s work is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License,… If you use it, great. If you fix it, pass the fixes along using the same license. A great approach for offering code. ” My thoughts exactly.

Generate SourceSafe weekly activity reports using Visual FoxPro

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Building on the work covered in Essential SourceSafe, here’s some code that will generate two text files of the activity that your SourceSafe database has recorded in the past week. This can be a handy way to keep track with what’s going on in a busy project.

(Changing the text output into an RSS feed is an exercise left to the reader. Cool idea, eh?)

I used Visual FoxPro to generate the commands for SourceSafe, as I couldn’t figure out a way to generate a date less seven days in a DOS command shell. In my next post, you’ll see a slick way to generate the current date, but that didn’t help me here.

Save this program into a Visual FoxPro project, and optionally add a CONFIG.FPW with RESOURCE=OFF, SCREEN=OFF and build it into an EXE. Place the WeekHist.exe in the root of your SourceSafe install (or change the paths in the code below to match) and you can run the exe manually or set the .exe to run on a weekly scheduler using the OS’ scheduler tools. 


*==============================================================================
* Program.............:	WEEKHIST.PRG
* Purpose.............:	Generate a weekly history file from SourceSafe
* Author..............: Ted Roche
* Copyright...........: 2000-2005 by Ted Roche, licensed under the Creative
* ....................: Commons Attribution Share-Alike License,
* ....................: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/
* ....................: Please fix and pass along - Ted
* Last revision.......:	2005-June-30
* Parameters..........:	None
* Returns.............:	Nothing, outputs History.txt, .lst or .err
* Environment in......:	Must run in root of VSS install, ASSuMEs that the
* ....................: data directory and win32 directories are below
* Environment out.....: History.txt is brief, History.Lst is verbose
*==============================================================================
* Format is:
* win32\ss history $/ -R -vd07/02/05~06/26/05 -O@History.lst

* Try...Catch would be nice, but this supports any VFP runtimes
#DEFINE CRLF CHR(13)+CHR(10)
ON ERROR do errhand with ERROR(), MESSAGE(), MESSAGE(1), LINENO()

lcCommand = "win32\ss history $/ -R -vd" + ;
            DTOC(DATE()) + "~" + ;
            DTOC(DATE()-7) + ;
            " -B -O@History.txt"

RUN &lcCommand

lcCommand = "win32\ss history $/ -R -vd" + ;
            DTOC(DATE()) + "~" + ;
            DTOC(DATE()-7) + ;
            " -O@History.lst"

RUN &lcCommand

RETURN

PROCEDURE errhand(tnError, tcMessage, tcMessage1, tnLineno)
STRTOFILE(TTOC(DATETIME()) + " Error " + TRANSFORM(tnError) + CRLF + ;
          " Message " + tcMessage + CRLF + ;
          " Message1 " + tcMessage1 + CRLF + ;
          " Line " + TRANSFORM(tnLineNo)+ CRLF , "History.err", .t.)
ENDPROC && errhand

[UPDATED]: See newer posts for updates: here and here.