Frontpage Source Control (not)

Finally finished my assigned work, and am working on helping the rest of the folks get their folders finished so we can all submit our hours and go to bed. One thing that I have to say about Frontpage, for all it’s other weaknesses, it has a absolutely horrible source control system. Compared to something like CVS or even a stripped down, neutered, locked in a box and thrown in the ocean version of CVS, it’s still a joke.

First of all, it doesn’t seem to work, but then does. For some reason both mine and another guy on this project cannot check in files once they have been checked out. The option just isn’t available. When you try to open a file in frontpage that is checked out (and I use the term loosely for reasons you’ll see in a moment) it tells you that you can only open up a read only version. The theory is you can only save under a different name. Too bad you can just hit “Save” on this “read only” version and it saves just fine.

Frontpage apparently ships with a stripped down version of Visual Source Safe, which I’ve heard horror stories about from a buddy of mine who was doing some contract work for a company that is under the umbrella of the evil empire. Frontpage basically allows you to set a flag on a file, it’s either checked out or not.

Completely.


Bloody.


Useless.

At least with Visual Studio you can plug CVS in.

Lucky for me my latest contract is very geek and linux friendly (this is the one in Chilliwack). They have everything in CVS from the start, and all the documentation in (of all things) LaTeX, a professional documentation markup language.

Enough of a break, back to search and replace in Frontpage…