VSS - how to manage Dev and Live versions

Hi all

I wasn't sure if this was the best place to post?

I'm part of a development team (4 developers) and we've recently moved from SVN to VSS for our source control. We're struggling to find a balance in the best way to manage the Dev and Live versions of our site. We've branched the dev code to a live version so we can build from the live branch but the problems are that when we need to merge lots of files from the dev branch to the live branch it's taking a very long time as each file has to be merged seperately rather than as a batch. This seems like a lot of hassle? I can understand the need ut effectively we don't want to merge...more replace the live code as the dev code would have been fully tested before going into live.

A friend of mine suggested that we start with out live branch, ditch the dev branch and then branch from the live code to create a new dev branch. we then work from this new dev branch and then when it's ready to go live, we rename the branch to _Live_Vx.x.x (x = version number) and then create a new dev branch from the newly named live branch. I can see the benefits in this but wondered if it's the right way to go?

The website is our 'portal' which contains lots of 'apps' (basically sub directories off the root with independant code that isn't reliant on other areas of the site. These are being updated all the time and it's not feasible for us to have a scheduled release setup where we simply publish a new version of the entire portal say each week or month.

If anyone has any suggestions that might help - especially if you've been involved in the source control of large websites.

If the 'correct' way of doing this is via manually merging everything OR adopting a scheduled-release system then please let me know - it may be difficult for us to work in this way but I think all of the developers are agreed that we want to be doing things properly rather than hashing something together.

Regards

Wayne

Here are the guidelines we use in our group, taken from a Word doc. I don't know how to get the screen shots to show up, though

General Recommendations for Visual Source Safe (VSS)

Label each release to UAT (to set a Label, right click on the library and select "Label"; all sub-folders will be assigned the same Label)