Automatically label releases to production using Visual Source Safe

When I move a project from my computer to the production server I like to create a label in Visual Source Safe (VSS) that notes the date and time and that something was deployed. This allows me and others to always know what is in production and how long it has been in production. It also makes it easy to do a bug fix. It is nice to have this at the click of a batch file. Otherwise, I am just to lazy most of the time to wait for VSS (it is on a slow connection so it takes a long time to load or do anything), remember to check in my code, find the project I am working on, then create a label, and type in the date and time and try to remember the format of my label so that is the same. Here is the code I put in a batch file (just create a text file and change the extension to .bat) using my favorite text editor. For more information on how the NOW variable is populated and limitation on it, see my other entry at: http://justgeeks.blogspot.com/2008/07/getting-formatted-date-into-variable-in.html. If you are not using US English data format you will definitely need to change the line that sets NOW to work with your locale. Also, you will need to adjust the paths in this script to match your environment.

@echo off set NOW=%date:~10,4%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%--%time:~0,2%.%time:~3,2% echo Please make sure all changes are checked in pause set SSDIR=\\myVssServer\someDirWhereIniFileIs"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\ss" Label $/MyVssProjectPath -LDEPLOYED-%NOW% -C- echo A label has been created in VSS called: DEPLOYED-%NOW%