As part of the MSDN Subscription offering, a box of discs is delivered most months with updated versions of Microsoft software. Because a single DVD has many products on it, the disc churn rate is reasonably high. In addition to the disks that come in the mail, MSDN subscribers can download all the software available as part of their subscription directly from a Passport-secured website
There is about a three month lag between a product being available on the download site, and the physical disc arriving, so any product that you're really keen to use (like Visual Studio, Office, Windows and SQL Server) gets downloaded and burnt to a DVD long before the discs every arrive. Even without broadband, it is possible to download big releases like Visual Studio - in the days of severe broadband usage limits, I downloaded Visual Studio.NET 2002 over dial-up. The download can be paused, so I just kicked it off each night before I went to sleep, and the full download only took a couple of nights.
It seems to make a lot of sense for Microsoft to offer a download-only offering for MSDN Subscription. The price of a subscription has roughly doubled in the last five years, and in my conversations with lots of folks around the user group and at work, there are plenty of ex-subscribers around who find the cost too high. It would be great if the savings in disk distribution that would be achieved with a download-only MSDN Subscription offering could be passed directly onto the developer community, and the rate of folks with subscriptions could pick up again.
When connecting to VSS over the internet to a server that has the VSS web service on a web site that isn't sitting on port 80, the full name of the service needs to be specified in the connection settings on the client side, as shown below. If you simply try to specify http(s)://x.x.x.x:y (where y is the port number), Visual Studio will somehow miss the port when it parses out the server's IP address. To fix the problem, use the full path to the webservice, such as http://x.x.x.x:y/SourceSafe/VssService.asmx. Visual Studio will pick up the port number correctly when the URL is specified this way.
To set up internet access to VSS on a web site that isn't the default web site on the server side, I used the the VSS Admin exe to setup internet access according
to this article, backup the ISS virtual directory that SourceSafe created, and then restored it to the website on the arbitrary port.
