I'm just curious to hear about how others maintain multiple versions of their software and if VSS supports this or if there are better tools out there to handle this.

For example, let's say you release version 1 of your software.   Next you begin development on version 1.1 with some new features.  But during development of 1.1, you need to be able to fix bugs in 1.0 (AND in 1.1) so that you can release hotfixes to 1.0.  1.0 hotfixes cannot include half developed 1.1 features (that would be bad) so you have to maintain two copies of the code.  What is the best approach for managing this process?  I've typically done this manually in the past when I was doing consulting on my own and I was the only programmer (and without a company to invest in nice tools).  I would keep two copies of the code and if a bug had to be fixed while 1.1 was being developed, then I had to fix the code in both places.  Of course a manual process like this is error prone and I wish to avoid that coming up after the release of our software which is just around the corner. 

It would be great to hear everyone's insight into this issue and what you've done, what tools you've used, if VSS is good for this or if there are add-ons to VSS for this or a better product altogether!

Thanks!

Chad:

We are currently using a beta version of Team Foundation Server.  It supports branching and merging which are key features to doing what you want. We have had some problems with our large project running on an old beta 2 version.  Hopefully the issues we are seeing have already been addressed. We are happy with the merging capabilities that have been built in and it is much, much, much faster than VSS. Note that simple branching worked. To find out more about branching and merging with TFS, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vs05teamsys.asp

If TFS is outside your budget, you might also take a look at Subversion which should have the desired capabilities.

Chad,

I can tell you than branching in Subversion is pretty easy and straightforward. I have converted several repositories to Subversion and that is nottoo bad either.

I highly recommend it.

Chris