Microsoft KB Archive/138299

= INFO: Legal Visual SourceSafe Naming Conventions =

Article ID: 138299

Article Last Modified on 2/18/2002



This article was previously published under Q138299



SUMMARY
Visual SourceSafe does not allow certain characters in project names and filenames. Some of these limitations are specific to certain operating systems and some are over all platforms. Attempting to use these characters may cause the computer to hang (stop responding), quit, or corrupt some files. Please use caution when dealing with non-standard names.



NTFS:

 * 1 to 255 character name
 * Complete path for a file or project name cannot exceed 259 characters, including the separators
 * May not begin or end with a space
 * May not begin with a $
 * May contain 1 or more file extensions (eg. MyFile.Ext1.Ext2.Ext3.Txt)
 * Legal characters in the range of 32 - 255 but not ?"/\<>*|:
 * Filenames may be mixed case
 * Filename comparisons are case insensitive (eg. ThIs.TXT = this.txt)

MS-DOS and Windows 3.1:

 * 1 to 11 characters in the 8.3 naming convention
 * Legal characters are A-Z, 0-9, Double Byte Character Set (DBCS) characters (128 - 255), and _^$~!#%&-{}@'
 * May not contain spaces, 0 - 31, and "/\[]:;|=,
 * Must not begin with $
 * Uppercase only filenames, lowercase letters are mapped to uppercase

Legal Project Name Syntax

 * Project name must be 1 to 259 characters in length
 * Illegal characters are "\<>|:; and tab
 * May not begin or end with spaces
 * May not begin with a $
 * May contain DBCS characters

Legal Label Syntax

 * Label must be 1 to 31 characters in length
 * Must not begin or end with spaces or tabs
 * May contain DBCS characters

Legal Username Syntax

 * Username must be 1 to 31 characters
 * Must not begin or end with a space
 * May not contain !"$%'/:;<>?@[]\{}=^|*, or tab
 * May contain DBCS characters

