It happens to all of us, unfortunately the reason you are reading this is probably because it is happening to you now.
Let's say that your boss comes in one morning and asks you to work in a project, then he mentions you need to get it from Visual SourceSafe (VSS)... you think is a joke until you noticed that your boss has that "serious" look in his face. F*ck. Or maybe you receive the project in a compressed file and when you try to open it, you realize this project was under Visual Source Safe at some point.
Visual Source Safe (VSS) was an OK product years ago, it has been for a number of years, in my opinion, a bad choice for a source control system. This is the reason I personally do not like it and do not recommend it, from Wikipedia:
The criticism concerning instability stems largely from the way Visual SourceSafe uses a direct, file-based access mechanism that allows any client to modify a file in the repository after locking it. If a client machine crashes in the middle of updating a file, it can corrupt that file. Many users of Visual SourceSafe mitigate this risk by making use of a utility provided by Visual SourceSafe that checks the database for corruption and, when able, corrects errors that it finds.
I concur with the above, I experienced the file corruption issue with VSS multiple times in the past.
Today, I use tools such as Subversion and CVS. More recently, I have been using Mercurial too, which is a Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) just like Git. I do prefer Mercurial over Git, however that is a talk for another time.
Enough with the what and why, below I show you the steps you can follow to remove Visual SourceSafe dependencies from a Visual Studio solution and project(s).
Grab a fresh cup of coffee or your favorite caffeinated soda and follow the steps below:
1- Go to the folder containing the solution files and delete the following:
mssccprj.scc
[YourProjectName].vssscc
vssver.scc
*.vspscc
2- Open [YourSolutionName].sln in your favorite text editor and remove the following section:
GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
...
EndGlobalSection
3- Go to the folder containing the project files and delete the following:
[YourProjectName].vbproj.vspscc
mssccprj.scc
vssver.scc
*.vssscc
4- Open [YourProjectName].vbproj in your text editor and remove the following lines:
SccProjectName = "SAK"
SccLocalPath = "SAK"
SccAuxPath = "SAK"
SccProvider = "SAK"
Now you can open the solution/project without getting those ugly visual source control errors.
I hope this is useful to you, take care.