Tuesday, September 25, 2007

VSS: null file is already open

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is (maybe) one of most used applications for versioning of development files, at least using Microsoft technology in Windows environments ;)

The product should be quite mature, no big service packs or bugfixes were released so far, however "getting latest version" I got this message:


Maybe the developers left some files "Checked In" or before compiling didn't "Get Latest Version" ... ;)

1 comment:

Alin Constantin said...

Actually, what happens is that the code that opens the file receives the error, but doesn't display an error message immediately (in the code where the file name is available). The error code is returned to the calling function, and so on, until the "catch all" type of code at the bottom of the stack receives the error code and attempt to display the message.
That code has no access to the file name that caused the problem, so it uses "(null)" to format the error's message string.

I know, it's not ideal, but it's better than in VSS 6.0 (which accesses the memory from the stack and try to interpret as a string, then display a message with a gibberish filename or randomly crash).