How to: Share an Item

Article
05/01/2007

Visual SourceSafe supports file and project sharing as described in Sharing and Branching. This topic provides some specific sharing procedures. To use the Share command, you must have the Check Out/Check In right in the project you are sharing from. You will need the Add/Rename/Delete right in the project to which you are sharing.

To understand sharing, consider a scenario in which your team develops a suite of tools that do different things but work on the same data format. All the tools are built around a common set of core code. You will store the specific files for each tool in its own project, but share the common files among all the tool projects. That way, any change made to a common file is immediately propagated to all the tools.

For example, the database group of the office tools team wants to add a spell checker. The word processing group already has a spell checker. The database group could just add the spell checker files to its project, but the two groups would not be connected. If the database team found a bug in the spell checker, the word processing group would have to duplicate the change. By sharing the files, both groups work with common source files and all changes are automatically seen by both projects.

In Visual SourceSafe Explorer, select a project to share a file.
On the Versions menu, click Share.
In the Share with <name> dialog box, use the File to share box to select the name of the file to share with the selected project.
If necessary, click View to look at the latest version of the file.
In the Projects box, choose the project from which you want to share the file.
Click Share to share the selected file.

In Visual SourceSafe Explorer, right-click an item.
Drag the item over the receiving project and drop the item.
In the resulting menu, click Share.

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