Disabling .root folder using VS 2003 with integrated Visual SourceSafe
A change that was made when VS 2003 was released back in 2003 was how it created a folder structure in Visual SourceSafe 6.0 (VSS) when adding a new solution into VSS from within the VS IDE. Instead of matching the current disk folder structure where your solution file and project folders used within the solution it creates its own root directory (named with your solution name and the .root prefix) where the solution file is placed and then creates project sub-directories beneath it for each project within the solution. While I see the logic behind the change it is not useful to all of us, and in fact becomes an annoyance when your project team already has a defined VSS structure outlined in coding standards and you're still using VS 2003. Luckly you can disable this feature although finding out how was tough to locate as it's buried in some MSDN documentation. To disable it you need to switch a registry setting on each developer machine (I usually make this part of the developer workstation set up). Change the following key value to disable the .root folder creation functionality in VSS:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\SourceControl] "DoNotCreateSolutionRootFolderInSourceControl"=dword:00000001
You can find detailed information on how VSS is mapping its folder structure when you add a solution by reading the following MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vsconSlnRootinVSS.asp