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As Peter Bromberg notes, we recently released an updated source control plug-in* for gotdotnet Workspaces that enables you to work on projects stored in gotdotnet (check in, check out, and other source control operations) from the comfort of your very own VS.NET 2005 (or 2003) IDE.

[Peter Bromberg]
"Kudos to GotDotNet Team: VS.NET SCC Workspaces Provider and FIX for switching!

They've been making improvements over at gotdotnet.com, not the least of which is their new SCC plugin to use the GotDotNet Workspaces source control arrangement. Not only does it work very nicely in VS.NET 2005, it also works with VS.NET 2003!

It's just like working in VSS; the only difference is that since you are working via WebServices, it's a bit slower. But everything works! Really a boon to developers who like the Gotdotnet Workspaces concept and have small groups of developers who work together on a project.

The only downside is that when you want to get a project out of your regular VSS provider, IIT BREAKS and doesn't work!

But there are several fixes, the best one I've found is Soenke Schau's Sourcecode Control Switcher.

This little tray app tells you your current provider and let's you switch at will by changing the Registry entries for you. And, you don't need to leave it running. Just put a shortcut to the desktop and bring it up when you need it."

I too like Soenke's source control switcher. For other utilities that do the same thing, see How To: Switch Source Control Providers in VS.NET (ReduxRedux). I should also note that the ability to switch source control providers, say from VSS to Gotdotnet, is now baked into VS.NET. If you have more than one scc provider registered, you can now choose the one you want to use from the Source Control menu. Call me nostaligic, but I still prefer the systray utilities. Nevertheless, it's good to have options.

----
*If you have Visual Studio .NET 2005 installed, download this SCC plug-in. Once complete, open Visual Studio, click File, click Source Control, and then click Open from Source Control. If and when you need to switch from the Workspaces SCC provider to Visual SourceSafe, Team Foundation, Perforce, Clearcase, etc, open Visual Studio, click Tools, click Options, click Source Control, and then select Plug-in Selection. Select the SCC plug-in you wish to use instead of Workspaces, and then click Ok. The SCC provider is a solution-level setting. You cannot add one project in a solution to workspaces, for example, and another project in the same solution to Team Foundation.

If, for some odd reason, you should ever want to revert to using the winforms control to perform source control operations on the files in a gotdotnet Workspace, go to this page. I've created the workspace with which this URL is associated for this purpose so you may have to join the workspace to access the page. Don't worry. Just do it.

If you have Visual Studio .NET 2003 installed, download this SCC plug-in. Once complete, open Visual Studio, click File, click Source Control, and then click Open from Source Control. You should see a dialog box that prompts you to log into gotdotnet. If and when you need to switch from the Workspaces SCC provider to Visual SourceSafe, Team Foundation, Perforce, Clearcase, etc, you must install and use one of the SCC switcher utilities that I point to in How To: Switch Source Control Providers in VS.NET (ReduxRedux) and related blog posts. It's possible to flip a bit in the registry but that's just soooo Raymond Chen.

A customer asked me this question via email today. Unable to remember how to do this (I've been off VSS for over a year), I pinged one of the VSS team's awesome developers, Alin, who promptly responded with this gem:

"You can use VSS Automation to find out the number of files in a folder and their names. Here is the function for doing that:

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

Dim db As New SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSDatabase

db.Open("\\alinc00\vss$\", "Guest", "")

Dim item As SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSItem

item = db.VSSItem("$/")

MsgBox("Total number of files and subfolders = " + item.Items.Count.ToString)

Dim files As Integer

Dim child As SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSItem

files = 0

For Each child In item.Items

If child.Type = SourceSafeTypeLib.VSSItemType.VSSITEM_FILE Then

files = files + 1

End If

Next

MsgBox("Total number of files = " + files.ToString)

End Sub

The command line SS.exe alone cannot be used, but combined with other utilities it can provide the answer.

ss dir $/ | findstr /R "^[^\$]" | wc –l

(ss dir lists the files and folders, findstr filters out files, wc counts the lines)

Subtract 1 from the answer to find the number of files (because the last line displayed by ss.exe contains the total number of files and folders) or use something like

@for /F %I in ('ss dir $/ ^| findstr /R "^[^\$]" ^| wc -l') do set /a FILES=%I-1 > NUL

@echo There are %FILES% files in this folder

Here's a little internal Microsoft dirt: I'm the person behind the scenes who reviews and approves or rejects all gotdotnet User Samples submissions. For the record, this will not always be my job (things change) but for now, I actually look forward to completing at least one routine and manual task a day. Sure, I've considered automating the approval process. That's the Microsoft way, right? For now though, I've decided that this task is a healthy and valuable exercise insofar as it forces me to evolve and broaden my technical skills and more importantly, it approximates me to the interests of gotdotnet users.

On Monday, a former teammate on the Visual SourceSafe Team (GDN handle: patmccor) uploaded a new source/version control utilities for VSS: VSSDATAWIZ. I saw and excitedly approved datawiz and a companion tool, fixref goes with datawiz within minutes. Unfortunately, patmccor's description of the new VSS admin tools were not exactly illuminating. So I asked him for more details. Joila! He provides the following description.

What is DATAWIZ?
Datawiz is primarily used to remove "orphan projects" and fix file pathing problems in Visual SourceSafe. Orphan projects are created when:

1. A deleted and destroy operation that does not complete due to an interruption in the destroy process
2. Destroys on branched to projects never really remove the files (this is due to a link that exists from the branch from file which datawiz also cleans up)

Problem Datawiz solves: orphaned VSS projects take up lots of extra disk space and cause Analyze to run longer than needed. If you've ever run Analyze.exe on a big database, you know that "longer than needed" can be one heckuva long time.

When do you know that you should run Datawiz?
When running Analyze.exe, you receive an error message of the following type:
"The Parent Project for item index.htm (agypaaaa) is corrupt and the link to the child file has been lost until the project is recovered."
"The project testproj references a child whose physical file (VOALAAAA) is missing or corrupted."

Sometimes other errors can be cleaned up serendipitously because the files that contain the errors are also orphans.

Pathing problems can occur if a project is renamed or moved. The path information is hard coded into each project file.
This information only affects the labels directory. If the pathing information is inconsistent with the path, and you try to get the project files by label (SS Get proj1 -Llabelname), you might see the message "Version not found."

Analyze does not always detect or fix this type of error. When analyze does detect this error it returns this error message:
"The parent project name was corrupt $/BASES/Finance/test/WinForms/WINFORMS the real name should be $/BASES/Finance/test/WinForms/WINFORMS1."

Caution: Datawiz is a beta-quality tool and is officially unsupported by Microsoft. Use at your own risk.
Taking a backup of your VSS database is always a good idea.

Datawiz part 1 can be run against a live database and does not change anything. When your the datawiz batch file, it creates a backup of all the files it changes and it generates another batch file to undo the changes made.

To realize extra benefits, you should also run:

Ss physical $/ -r –ophysicalbefore.txt
And
Ss physical $/ -r –ophysicalafter.txt

Before and after running the datawiz batch file (you may need to set the ssdir variable to point to the database e.g set ssdir=//machine/vss), you can use VSS to diff your files and determine if there any changes were made. The two files should be identical.

Datawiz also includes a special query that provides a report of the file share links that exist in your database. This query is informational only.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a fully tested version of the datawiz utility will be bundled into the Visual SourceSafe 2005 Analyze.exe release.

I'm blogging to you live from the RAI Congrescentrum in Amsterdam, Netherlands where Ashwin Karuhatty and Brian Randall are introducing European developers and IT professionals to Visual Studio Team Foundation version control (or source control, if you prefer). The excitement around this product is huge, palpable, (I've been pinch hitting for VSTS booth crew this week) and honestly, quite believable. The presentation is taking place in the main "keynote" auditorium and although it's 10:15 AM on the last rainy day of the conference, there are somewhere between 500 and 1000 folks in the audience. Okay, they're starting now...

Live Photos:

• http://photos21.flickr.com/24426183_1089907d01.jpg
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/81201730@N00/24808033/

Microsoft will use this tool for all development and project planning inside Microsoft. "This is a mandate from on high," Brian adds.

Ashwin Karuhatty [no blog] -- Why a new source control system from Microsoft?

• Performance over the wire
• No corruption
• Scalability

Visual SourceSafe was designed for small teams in a different era. Customer needs have evolved and their expectations have changed as well. Team Fouindation is an enterprise-class source control and work item tracking solution for serious development, on your LAN and around the world. "It is not Visual SourceSafe," Ashwin says to appreciative whistles and applause.

New Features

• Integrated checkin
• Source Control Explorer
• Shelving
• more...

Brian Randall -- Feature Support

• Atomic checkin (transactionality) -- "All of us have probably experienced a failed checkin using Visual SourceSafe that couldn't be rolled back. The vocabulary that came out of our mouths was not rated for children."
• Work Item integration
• Checkin Policies
• Shelving
• Delta File Storage
• Email checkin notification (and full event support for extensibility)
• non-Windows support
• Diff Tool Extensibility (Brian has seen an Image diff plug-in)???
• Shared Checkouts by default
• Rich VS 2003 integration

Checkin Policies

Mechanism for validating source changes prior to checkin. Evaluated on the client. Not a security mechanism. Extensible via plicy plug-ins. .NET managed assemblies. iPolicyDefinition: define policy. iPolicyEvaluation... Great part of the presentation...

Bad Word check-in policy won't let developer check in code containing bad words without warning. You can bypass policies however. After all, this thing was designed and documented by liberty-loving Americans ;-).

Team Foundation Source Control settings. File Types...UI you can use to define files types for which you do not want to enable shared checkouts. Demo: exclusive checkout is denoted by a blue circle with a slash through it in the Source Control Explorer. Source Control Explorer is a great user interface that enables you to perform almost all source control tasks inside the Visual Studio IDE.

Ashwin's driving the presentation and moving back and forth between two users, checking out files for both "users", editing them, and then checking them in to demo merging, conflict resolution, & etc while Brian talks. Brian stops, steps left, says, "Ashwin must be getting confused. I'm one user," steps right, "I'm another user," steps left. "I'm the other user... Kind of like that movie, Me, Myself and Irene." Brian is an entertaining speaker.

Promotion Modeling -- this is nigh impossible to blog about. Demo highly valuable. Hopefully, somebody's podcasting this presentation. Basically, Brian is branching a codeline in the Visual Studio Team System Source Control Explorer. Having worked on this for years, I know how difficult it can be to make this process easy to understand. And quite honestly, I think that the Hatteras team has some work to do in this department for future generations of developers. Brian demonstrates a "cherry pick" merge where he "promotes" changes from select files into the latest version.

Efficient File Storage -- 1. Compress files before they are even uploaded. Then, they're added to the file store and processed by a "deltafier" (not the defiler;-) that splits the file (non-binary) into... Caching proxy. File content cached on LAN. Ideal for regional offices. You'll install an extra IIS box in the remote location. See my post from TechEd US for more...

Supporting the Enterprise Platform Support

Clients shipping with VS 2005

• VS2005 Solution Explorer integration
• SCC Explorer
• Command Line (has more functionality such as the ability to undo checkouts of other people who are on vacation, for example)
• MSSCCI Client for VS 03, VB6, VC6

Coming from Partners

• Eclipse Plug-in
• SourceGear's Allerton, a UNIX, Linux, MacOS

[podcast placeholder]

[related blog posts placeholder]

This looks interesting:

"SSWI is a Microsoft Visual Source Safe web interface that allows you to use all of Visual Source Safe's features from Internet Explorer anywhere in the world. No client side installations required, simply point your browser at your SSWI server and you're done."

http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/resources/Default.aspx?query=Source%20Safe%20Web%20Interface

A reader recently emailed me the following issue/question:

"I recently installed the VS 2005 December CTP on a machine that also has VS 2003 installed. I uninstalled the CTP today and now my VS2003 'change source control' menu choice (from the file menu) has disappeared.

How do I get it back."

I've heard about this problem before and as I recall, this is a VSS-specific issue. However, it could affect other source control providers as well. This post explains how to regain the ability to change source control (unbind solution/project, rebind, disconnect/remove from source control, etc) The issue occurs under the following conditions:

1. You have Visual SourceSafe 6.0x and Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 on your machine
2. You install Visual Studio Whidbey 2005 CTP or beta AND you install Visual SourceSafe 2005.
3. You uninstall VS2005 and/or SourceSafe2005.

Cause: SourceSafe 6.0x and SourceSafe 2005 cannot be installed side-by-side. When you install VSS 2005, it overwrites VSS 6.0x's registry settings.

To Fix: Re-register the integration dll (ssscc.dll) from the VSS 6.0x install, either by running regsvr32.exe (regsvr32 ssscc.dll) or by running ssint.exe provided with VSS6. If you're using VSS automation for FrontPage projects, you should also re-register the SSAPI.dll for IVSS interfaces.

I have not confirmed that these steps work as advertised so if the fix works (or does not work) for you, please drop a comment to let future readers know.

Tone Engel reports that, "Joined the FlexWiki GotDotNet group last night for source code access which is provided through a custom source code control provider that integrates with Visual Studio."*

I am an avid FlexWiki and GotDotNet user/contributor and just recently joined the GotDotNet development team here at Microsoft. Prior to joining my new team last week, I worked on the MSDN Communities & Personalization Team for a couple of months before being plucked from the comfortable nest of my new team by another hungry manager :-). Prior to MSDN, I spent roughly four years contributing to development of:

• Visual Studio .NET 2002 (v1)
• Source control integration for the Visual Studio IDE (called "vscore" internally).
• Visual SourceSafe 6.0a,b,c,d,e and 8.0 (called SourceSafe internally;-)
• A secret project that got canceled just as we were about to roll out the Beta. Big bummer.
• For most of last year, I worked feverishly on Hatteras, which is the killer new source control component of the upcoming Visual Studio Team Foundation family. Hatteras is the next big thing in version control.

My new job is to determine how we can improve GotDotNet to better meet the needs of the developer community and ad hoc collaborative development projects like FlexWiki. I'll be working closely with Betsy Aoki. In the short term, I think that's going to mean providing better support and documentation. In the long term, I believe that we must maintain the spirit, community, and well-rounded feature set that makes GotDotNet such a great place to go for sweet ideas, useful kludges for dev tools, words of advice, jumpstarter code samples and full-on starter kits, and to meet and collaborate with other folks who share our passion for code and our time/domain-specific interests. We also have to beef up our back end services and improve some usability issues which, in addition to source/version control, is my specialty.

[Tone Engel again] "I'm certain Whidbey will address this hole in Visual Studio's current support for 3rd party source control integration so I don't think it makes much sense to take this project any further. It's silly that Visual Studio doesn't auto detect the source control provider from a solution file and switch it for you on the fly."

Whidbey does "address this hole" and yes, it is silly. I fought the good fight to include this functionality in Visual Studio 2003 (aka Everett) and lost. However, I successfully convinced my team, thanks to your many and vociferous complaints, to include automatic source control provider switching in Visual Studio 2005, Whidbey. Woohoo!!! I've been using it without a hitch for months. For those of you who don't want to or cannot install the VS2005 Beta (like, um, you're working on production code), there are quite a few SCC switching tools for Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 around, in addition to the one that Tone points to in his post. I think I've mentioned most of them in a series of blog posts...

BTW, it is absolutely awesome to witness the development of tools like this out on GotDotNet. Perhaps we should consider opening up some of the GDN codebase for community development, like Slashdot. What do you think?

Other SCC Provider Switching Utilities for Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003

How To: Switch Source Control Providers in VS.NET
SCC Plug-in Switcher for Visual Studio
How To: Switch Source Control Providers in VS.NET (Redux)
How To: Switch Source Control Providers in VS.NET (ReduxRedux)

+++++++++++++
*To better meet the needs of the FlexWiki virtual development team, DavidOrn and a few other pivotal members migrated the codebase and mainline development over to SourceForge in October of last year. FTR, I supported that move despite mixed feelings. I wonder if the creation of the position I now fill was somehow precipitated by that event. Hmmm {wry grin}.

Okay, I give in. Who is behind the new DevelopmentNow blog?
Whoever it is, they just posted a VSS database analysis script (Win script...untested by me) that provides a third alternative to the two scripts (one PERL, one VBScript) and link to a third script that appear in my July 2003 post on the subject: End-to-End Analyze Script for Keeping a VSS Database Healthy.

"Unexpected Get" was the subject of a very interesting email thread that passed through my Outlook Inbox today. I mentioned the issue it raises in a previous post: Team Foundation vs. SourceSafe | Checking Out. Basically, VSS and Team Foundation perform check out operations in two very different ways.
Note For an explanation of acronyms and codenames used in this thread, please refer to the end of the post.

---------------------------------------
Subject: Unexpected Get

[VSS User] I have a question about unexpectedly getting a file when checking out. For example… I checkout a file and while it’s being checked out a new version is downloaded from the SCC provider. Can this ever happen?

[VSS Team Member] Actually this is the default behavior of all commands in VSS 6.0x. Get of latest database version is performed on operations like Checkout, UndoCheckout, and Checkin.
This default behavior will change in VSS 2005. By default, VSS 8 will checkout the local version (whenever possible to determine what the local version is), similar to SourceDepot’s behavior.
Note that using COLV increases your chances of having to merge the files during checkin.
Users who like the old behavior will be able to change this via Tools/Options.

[VSS User] Thanks!
Is there already an option for this in Whidbey?

[VSS Team Member] VSS 2005 will ship in the Whidbey release of VS2005, so yes.
If you work on a newly created database you should have COLV by default.
If you work on an older database, the VSS database administrator needs to uncheck in SsAdmin in Tools/Options/General the “Only allow checkouts of the latest version” checkbox and the users may need to express their preferences in SsExp (in Tools/Options/General check “Always check out the working folder version of the files”)

[VSS User] I actually needed to figure out how to turn OFF this option. I’m not sure how new my database is but I turned off the “Always check out the working folder version of the files” in Whidbey using “Tools/Options/Source Control/Plug-in Settings/Advanced” on the general tab which is another way to get there. This got the ‘unexpected get’ behavior working for my tests.
Thanks again.

[VSS Team Member] This option has a negated logic of turning it on and off J
If you uncheck “Always check out the working folder version of the files”, you’ll be checking out the latest database version (same as VSS6 did), which will cause the ‘unexpected get’ behavior you’ve noticed.
To get rid of the ‘unexpected get’, you need to check “Always check out the working folder version of the files”, so you’ll be checking out the local version (COLV), same as SourceDepot and VSS8 does by default.
Note that COLV feature will not work correctly if you delete vssver2.scc files from local disk, or if you checkout in the same local folder files from different folders in database, etc.

(Acronym/Codename==Meaning):
COLV==Check Out Local Version
GLV::Get Latest Version
SCC==Source Code Control
SourceDepot==Microsoft's internal SCC tool
SSAdmin==SourceSafe Administrator user interface
SSExp==SourceSafe Explorer user interface
VSS2005||VSS8==Visual SourceSafe 2005
VS2005==Visual Studio 2005
Whidbey==code name for Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005), with which the next version of SourceSafe will ship.

So I guess VSS and Team Foundation aren't so different after all...;-)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Big Smiling Disclaimer Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation is an orange tree and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is an apple. They're both sweet but they don't compare. SourceSafe is a standalone source control system for individual developers and small teams. Team Foundation is an integrated work item tracking and version control system for professional development teams of any size. For more information, see The [new] Future of Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft's New Source Code Control Application. So do you approve of the title of this post, Buck?

Klingons and Romulans everywhere will bristle with pride when they learn that cloaking has survived the conceptual port from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation. Cloaking is a vital feature in VSS as it speeds up expensive Get operations and conserves disk space on your client by not retrieving items that you deem outside the scope of your project. For Team Foundation users, cloaking works in roughly the same way as it does in VSS. In my opinion however, it is not such a killer feature, mainly because Team Foundation gets at warp speed compared to VSS and partly because disk space is much cheaper today than it was in VSS' heyday.

[John Gallant] "I finally learned what the cloaking feature of VSS does and wanted to share.

If you cloak a folder, you are marking it as a folder that you do not want to include in a recursive get.

For example, lets say you have this dir structure.

$/
- Apps (Cloaked)
- TestCases

If you were to do a recursive get from $/, the Apps directory would be excluded from the get.

This is very helpful if you want to get latest, but don't want to get a certain dir, like "Images" for instance. A real time saver in my opinion.

How To Cloak:
1. Right click on VSS project
2. Select Properties
3. Check the "project cloaked for me" checkbox.

Here's the complete ref.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/guides/html/vstskcloak_projects.asp"

In the Visual Studio Team System IDE, you can cloak a folder in your workspace using the Source Control Explorer in roughly the same way you do it in the VSS explorer. Using the Team Foundation command line utility, you can cloak a folder in your workspace using tf workfold /cloak c:\projects\images. Doing so ensures that the contents of the repository folder to which \images maps are not retrieved to disk during recursive Get operations of the c:\ or c:\projects directories.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation is an orange tree and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is an pomegranate. They're both sweet but they don't compare. SourceSafe is a standalone source control system for individual developers and small teams. Team Foundation is an integrated, extensible work item tracking, workflow management, and source control system for teams of any size. For more information, see The [new] Future of Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft's New Source Code Control Application.

This deserves more than a trackback: Jason Mauss' VSS Tips and Tricks

In response to my previous post, Inspired Software Development::VSS Performance Improvements, Jason Mauss provides an excellent VSS performance tip:

"Most people administrating VSS don't seem to know about setting the CP_OnSelection value to NO. This is incredibly useful for users accessing VSS over a remote connection. Why? Normally whenever you click on a folder (a project or project grouping level) VSS performs a selection operation, which can take a while over a slow remote connection. By setting CP_OnSelection to no, users can drill down in the project hierarchy and just double-click or hit Enter when they find the folder they want to actually select, not having to wait a while for each level they expand. I've found this to solve half of the remote connection slowness issue for me."

At the very moment I was reading Jason's comment, enjoying a hearty bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, an email about VSS performance arrived from one of our hardworking VSS Product Support representatives.

"When using the restore wizard via the SourceSafe admin, you'll notice the CPU using up to 90% processor, but if you click on the title bar of the progress window and hold, utilization goes down to ~15 percent and the restore completes much quicker."

Go figure! This issue appears to repro on all VSS 6.0 builds.

Imagine... You're fresh out of college with a computer science degree. You apply for and get hired as a "Configuration Manager" at a little software company down the street. On your first day, your manager says, "Okay, you've used VSS before, right? Your first task is to sit here and hold down the mouse button on the title bar of this progress window until the restore operation completes." LOL.

Seriously though, the VSS Performance SWAT team is undoubtedly looking into a fix for this issue as I write. In the meantime, if you publish a programmatic fix or workaround (ie, a script that holds down the mouse button for you;-) to this issue on the Internet and you are the first person to do so and notify me of such, I will personally send you a Visual Studio 2005 baseball which has been autographed by me and a few other notable Microsoft bloggers like Raymond Chen, Betsy Aoki, KC Lemson, and Josh Ledgard.

[CheckItOut] “A while ago the SourceSafe product team had a focus week on creating sample applications that solved common community issues. We call them “PowerToys”. The goal for these sample applications is to address frequently asked questions we observe in newsgroups/email/conferences etc. [...] We will publish the PowerToys as GotDotNet workspaces. That way we can collaborate with you in creating useful sample applications for the SourceSafe user community.

The first PowerToy to be available is the “SourceSafe User Manager”, you can access it at:

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/VSSUserManagerPT

This is a simple application that allows exporting & importing of user lists from one SourceSafe database to another. It also allows importing a user list from a Windows group.”

Has anyone out there used SQL ScriptSafe? If so, did it meet your needs? Have you used similar tools? How does it compare?

Currently, it is not possible to migrate or copy a list of users and their concominant rights/assignments from an existing VSS database to another one, using either shipped VSS features or programmatically, using IVSS. However, our capable friends in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) have developed a tool that can perform this task automatically. You can download this tool from http://www.korbyparnell.com/tools/vssems.msi.

If you are the designated VSS database administrator on your team, VSSEMS can help you do much more than copy a user list from one database to another. Check it out. This utility is officially unsupported by Microsoft (or me for that matter :-). However, if you experience any difficulties while using it, please feel free to let me know.