I have been asked by several different people at various times if they could use the new Visual SourceSafe (VSS) 2005 with the Visual Studio (VS) 2003. Well, I had never really heard one way or the other in any of the VS 2005 release if that was possible. So, of course, I hit Google to scour the web for an answer and, believe it or not, found very little information or very vague information on the topic. This makes some sense as, if possible, you should use the new Microsoft Team Foundation Server and all it's great features, but in reality a lot of companies can't introduce such a drastic new server application into their development teams who are in the middle of on going products. Companies with larger development groups need to have a project plan in place for migrating into a large new system like TFS so in the mean time they'd still like to use newer products where possible, thus the questions on VSS 2005 and VS 2003 integration.
Since I couldn't find much on the web I tried it on my own. And the short answer is "Yes!" you can definitely use VS 2003 IDE to connect seemlessly with a VSS 2005 data store. The only requirement is that the developer install the VSS 2005 client onto their workstation. You cannot connect with just the old VSS 6.0d installed on your workstation. Installing the VSS 2005 client puts in place the newer MSSCI provider which is needed to talk from VS 2003 to the VSS 2005 data.
Hopefully I just saved some people some time if they are out on the web doing a search on this very topic. Having this listed on a feature list of the new VSS 2005 would have saved me some time, but at least the answer is a simple one!