One would think that Microsoft has improved Visual Source Safe a lot with the release of VSS 2005. And until this week I was happy to say that it appeared to be much more stable and reliable than any of the previous versions. But today I tried to view the difference between two checked-in versions of a stored procedure.
I right clicked the file in VSS and selected "Show History". I clicked OK in the dialog that VSS presented to me and nothing happened. I thought my installation was somehow corrupted. Why, I honestly don't know, but I proceeded in re-installing VSS 2005. But that didn't solve my problem. So I went to the Microsoft Visual Studio Source Control and Sourcesafe forum and found this thread which contains the following solution to the problem:
- Start Visual SourceSafe Administrator.
- On the Tools menu, click Options.
- In the Options dialog box, click the Time Zone tab.
- Change the Time Zone setting for the database to <None Specified>. This setting is the first entry in the list.
- Click OK, and then quit Visual SourceSafe Administrator.
- If you have Visual SourceSafe Explorer (SSEXP) open, close and then reopen SSEXP to apply the changes
And then the history option works again. Weird right?