At work we have a rather large vb.net project in Source Safe written using Visual Studio .NET 2003. There is an XML file we use to help manage some code generation that at times needs to be checked out by mulitple people on the team working on the project.

Every once in a while we get a dreaded error message when trying to check out the XML file that says:

"Cannot check out %filename% . It is binary and is already checked out."

We have found that this occurs as a result of soemone editing the XML file outside of Visual Studio and then checking it back in.

The Fix:

1) Have everyone check the file in.
2) Open up Visual Souce Safe and navigate to the file.
3) Right Click on the file and select properties.
3) Change the Type of the file to: "ANSI/MBCS" (see image below)

The problem should be solved now.