Shane's Blog

I did a little research to see what Microsoft say in relation to installing Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2003 side by side on the same machine.

According to Microsoft, cf [1], Visual Studio 6.0, 2002, 2003 and 2005 can all be run side by side on the same machine. If, however, you open a project created in Visual Studio 2003 in Visual Studio 2005, you cannot open it again in Visual Studio 2003.

Regarding Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft explains, cf [2] that the SourceSafe database format has not changed between SourceSafe 6.0 and SourceSafe 2005, therefore, you can access a Visual SourceSafe 6.0 database from a Visual SourceSafe 2005 client installation. From what I've read, cf [5], [6] and [8], you can just use Visual SourceSafe 2005 with Visual Studio 2003 and it works fine. Some new features of Visual SourceSafe 2005 are not available from within Visual Studio 2003, but that seems quite reasonable to me. While you can install Visual SourceSafe 2005 and Visual SourceSafe 2003 on the same machine, it seems, cf [7], that only one Visual Studio plug-in (ssscc.dll) can be registered at a time. There are tools to allow you to re-register the appropriate dll, cf [9].

Regarding IIS, in order to separate them, you can apparently, cf [4], run different version of the CLR in different application pools.

So, I would suggest installing Visual Studio 2005 and Visual SourceSafe 2005 on our pcs. I don't think it should be a problem leaving Visual SourceSafe 6.0 installed, but if you want to uninstall Visual SourceSafe 6.0, I would recommend doing it before installing Visual SourceSafe 2005 in order to avoid causing registrations problems with the plug-in dll for Visual Studio.

References:

Microsoft Articles:

[1] Installing Visual Studio Versions Side-by-Side

[2] What's New in Visual SourceSafe

[3] Previous Versions

Microsoft Blogs:

[4] HOWTO: Install and Run ASP.Net 2.0 Side-by-Side

Forums on microsoft.com, but not necessarily Microsoft's opinions:

[5] VSS 2005 and VS .NET 2003? (for HTTP support) - June 2005

Non-Microsoft.com forum posts:

[6] VS 2003 and VS 2005
"With ASP.Net you must just keep in mind that after installing ASP.Net 2.0 the default framework on the machine might be 2.0 and not 1.1. Normally if your site have changed to 2.0 you can just change it in IIS back to 1.1. I know this is an issue for some stuff like Report server (2000)."

[7] side-by-side install of sourcesafe 6.0d and 2005?

Non-Microsoft blogs:

[8] SourceSafe 2005 and Visual Studio .NET 2003

Non-Microsoft tools:

[9] Source Control Provider (SCP) Selector