I am one of those who still from time to time get to use MS SourceSafe. This week I had a problem with some production code. To make a long story short, I had to rollback the code to see if our code was the source of the problem. However no labels or anything was made.

That's when I found out that using the sourcesafe command line tool, one could get the source as it was on a specific date. Here's how it's done:

First you need to set the an environmental variable named SSDIR to the location of the sourcesafe database. In Windows Vista, this is done by selecting properties on my computer, selecting Advanced System Settings, and the selecting Environmental Variables on the Advanced tab.

Second you have to open a command prompt and locate the SS.exe file which should be located in the sourcesafe-folder. I then created a new folder for where I wanted my new files and then I wrote something like: "c:\program files\source safe\win32\ss get $/Project/location to . -vd30/04/2007 -R"

I believe the date format changes depending on the country selected in your system settings.

This trick did magic and I was able to find out that our code was not the source of the problems experienced in the production environment.