The Visual SourceSafe folders that you see when running Visual SourceSafe Explorer
are not physical folders. The Visual SourceSafe folders are only logical folders
for presenting the information about a project in the Visual SourceSafe environment.
To check out a project's
files from Visual SourceSafe, however, you need
to associate the project's Visual SourceSafe
folder with a physical folder in your system.
The physical folder that will hold copies of files
is called the Working Folder for the Visual SourceSafe
folder. If you have defined no Working Folder
for a project, Visual SourceSafe won't let
you check out files from that project or get working
copies.
To create a Working Folder for
a project, choose the project in the SourceSafe
tree and select File, Set Working Folder from
the main menu. Use the resulting dialog box to
browse to a folder where you would like your copies
of the project's files to reside. You can
define a new folder on-the-fly at this point.
Each developer who uses Visual
SourceSafe Explorer must define his or her own
Working Folder for a project. Therefore, each
developer can have a separate copy of the project,
usually on a local drive or on a personal area
of a shared network drive.
The existence of multiple copies of the same project files may sound to you
like an opportunity for a lot of confusion. That's where the source-code management
activities of the next section enter into the picture.
