Resources Files in Multiple Languages - visual-studio

I'm working on a c# Visual Studio project I've taken over and one thing that is causing me a problem is that a package Castle.Components.Validators is installing every single resource file it has when I build for every single language it knows about. This means that in my eventual program directory I have folders for about 12 different languages. I don't want all those as it clutters things up and tbh I don't use the Validator resource files. How can I stop it including all those resource files?
Cheers,
Neil

there might be a more elegant way to deal with this Problem, but an easy one that'll work would be to add a post-build-script to your project, that deletes all the unnessecery files and folders.
Greetings
Juy Juka

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Better management for large number of shared files between TypeScript projects

I've been writing bots that run on a platform I do not have control over. Essentially, I can upload a single file, and it only has access to basic JS and the site runtime. I chose to actually develop in TypeScript and transpile, to make things easier (imo). Since the initial bot was written for an individual, I've been asked for a few other customized variants. I do not mind this as there is very little in the bots that need to be changed per person. I have been hardlinking the common files between the projects, so as to not have to update in multiple places. This is, without a doubt, a bad solution. I am developing this in Visual Studio 2015, although I also have Visual Studio Code available, if anyone knows of a better build method. I am not very familiar with either, however. I would prefer being able to keep the common files in one project, and import them as dependencies. Maybe I missed something obvious, but attempting the same as I would do for C# did not seem to work.
From the way you are describing things, it sounds like you need to use some sort of custom build.
I would keep each of your bots in the same project and make sure that they share code appropriately, and then after tsc transpiles your files, concatenate them for each bot. So, each bot will get the files that it needs all stuffed into a single, gargantuan file.
You will need to do some trickiness, like parsing import/require statements, or include some kind of directives in each file that describes what other files are needed.
This doesn't sound too tricky to do and is the approach that I would take given the problem description you have provided.
As it turns out, you can declare a tsconfig.json file, and in there, specify things like included directories and specific files. This wound up being exactly what I needed, and was remarkably easy to set up. I've been updated the apps/bots for a while now using this system, and all the common files are effortlessly "shared" between then, with only recompilation necessary.

Have multiple directories in processing when using the processing-ide?

I currently began a new project with processing and first started with the
processing-ide that comes together with the installation.
Is it possible to structure the project into subdirectories instead of having to put all classes into the single sketch folder? I looked at the documentation at https://processing.org/ but didn't find any useful information about how to divide projects into manageable source subdirectories. Your help is much appreciated :)
No the default Processing IDE does not support this.
Before switching to another IDE for Processing, keep in mind that Processing 3 will highly focus on creating an entirely new IDE, which "might" add this functionality.

Possible issues with multiple solution files for the same set of projects

Is there a list of all (or nearly all) possible issues that could stem from maintaining multiple solution files for the same set of projects? The only reason for doing so is different versions of Visual Studio.
I'm aware of the glaring issue where new projects are added in one solution file, that haven't been synced to the other. What are some others?
disclaimer: my current company is still entrenched using VS10, for mainly political reasons. so please, save the preaching about the need for having a single solution and how this is not the optimal "solution".
I've seen this done all the time, for the most part it is perfectly fine other than what you mentioned, any files added would have to be added to all of the projects. However, I would recommend you go with a make file of sorts, CMake is a very robust version but there are plenty of others. The way they work is basically, you write one script that defines how the project is to be made, then the end-user runs CMake.exe on it. It will take that script and generate the proper solution and project files for your entire project in the version of VS you want, it also supports generation of types like XCode and Eclipse solutions etc so it is very multi-platform.

Mono fo Android - One Solution for many clients

I have created three different solutions for three different clients, but those solutions are for an app that have the same features, classes, methods, resolution, except for the images, XML resource files, and a web service reference, that are specific for each one.
I would like to have just one solution for all those apps, that I could open in VS2010 IDE for edition, without errors. So, when I need to build or publish an specific app, I just set the client which one I need to, and go ahead to building or publishing.
It is important to consider that XML file names will be the same, as classes and images names too. The difference will be the content, but the name will always be the same.
My intention is to reduce my effort to maintain many solutions, having just one solution to work with.
In my company, we will have more than those three clients soon, so I am worried about how to maintain that. The best way will be have just one solution and when I need to generate a new app for a new client, I have just to change/include a few things (like some resources and images) and compile to a new client folder.
Is it possible? If so how?
One option would be to have a master solution which had the following
A "Template" project that contained your actual application and all of the shared code
Projects for all of your clients
In the projects for your clients, you could have links to the files in your files that come from your shared project. Then, in each of those projects, you could add the files that are only specific to them.
With this kind of structure, whenever you made a change to your Template project, all of the client projects would be updated as well because they just have pointers back to the Template project.
A good reference for this kind of setup would be the Json.Net Code Base. There he has a solution and project for all of the different configurations, but they all share the same files.
In terms of ensuring that the xml files are named properly, you might just want to put some checks into your main application to ensure that it has all of the files needed or potentially add a check into your build process.
There are many ways you could look to tackle this.
My favorite would be to run some sort of pre-build step - probably outside of Visual Studio - which simply replaces the files with the correct ones before you do a build. This would be easy to automate and easy to scale.
If you are going to be building for many more than three customers, then I think you should look to switch from Visual Studio building to some other automated build system - e.g. MSBuild from the command line or from something like TeamCity or CruiseControl. You'll find it much easier to scale if your build is automated (and robust)
If you don't like the file idea, then there are plenty of other things you could try:
You could try doing a similar step to above, but could do it inside VS using a pre-Build step.
You could use Conditional nodes within the .csproj file to switch files via a project configuration
You could look to shift the client-specific resources into another assembly - and then use GetResourceStream (or similar) at runtime to extract the resources.
But none of these feel as nice to me!

Should a .sln be committed to source control?

Is it a best practice to commit a .sln file to source control? When is it appropriate or inappropriate to do so?
Update
There were several good points made in the answers. Thanks for the responses!
I think it's clear from the other answers that solution files are useful and should be committed, even if they're not used for official builds. They're handy to have for anyone using Visual Studio features like Go To Definition/Declaration.
By default, they don't contain absolute paths or any other machine-specific artifacts. (Unfortunately, some add-in tools don't properly maintain this property, for instance, AMD CodeAnalyst.) If you're careful to use relative paths in your project files (both C++ and C#), they'll be machine-independent too.
Probably the more useful question is: what files should you exclude? Here's the content of my .gitignore file for my VS 2008 projects:
*.suo
*.user
*.ncb
Debug/
Release/
CodeAnalyst/
(The last entry is just for the AMD CodeAnalyst profiler.)
For VS 2010, you should also exclude the following:
ipch/
*.sdf
*.opensdf
Yes -- I think it's always appropriate. User specific settings are in other files.
Yes you should do this. A solution file contains only information about the overall structure of your solution. The information is global to the solution and is likely common to all developers in your project.
It doesn't contain any user specific settings.
You should definitely have it. Beside the reasons other people mentioned, it's needed to make one step build of the whole projects possible.
I generally agree that solution files should be checked in, however, at the company I work for we have done something different. We have a fairly large repository and developers work on different parts of the system from time to time. To support the way we work we would either have one big solution file or several smaller. Both of these have a few shortcomings and require manual work on the developers part. To avoid this, we have made a plug-in that handles all that.
The plug-in let each developer check out a subset of the source tree to work on simply by selecting the relevant projects from the repository. The plugin then generates a solution file and modifies project files on the fly for the given solution. It also handles references. In other words, all the developer has to do is to select the appropriate projects and then the necessary files are generated/modified. This also allows us to customize various other settings to ensure company standards.
Additionally we use the plug-in to support various check-in policies, which generally prevents users from submitting faulty/non-compliant code to the repository.
Yes, things you should commit are:
solution (*.sln),
project files,
all source files,
app config files
build scripts
Things you should not commit are:
solution user options (.suo) files,
build generated files (e.g. using a build script) [Edit:] - only if all necessary build scripts and tools are available under version control (to ensure builds are authentic in cvs history)
Regarding other automatically generated files, there is a separate thread.
Yes, it should be part of the source control.
When ever you add/remove projects from your application, .sln would get updated and it would be good to have it under source control. It would allow you to pull out your application code 2 versions back and directly do a build (if at all required).
Yes, you always want to include the .sln file, it includes the links to all the projects that are in the solution.
Under most circumstances, it's a good idea to commit .sln files to source control.
If your .sln files are generated by another tool (such as CMake) then it's probably inappropriate to put them into source control.
We do because it keeps everything in sync. All the necessary projects are located together, and no one has to worry about missing one. Our build server (Ant Hill Pro) also uses the sln to figure which projects to build for a release.
We usually put all of our solutions files in a solutions directory. This way we separate the solution from the code a little bit, and it's easier to pick out the project I need to work on.
The only case where you would even considder not storing it in source control would be if you had a large solution with many projects which was in source control, and you wanted to create a small solution with some of the projects from the main solution for some private transient requirement.
Yes - Everything used to generate your product should be in source control.
We keep or solution files in TFS Version Control. But since or main solution is really large, most developers have a personal solution containing only what they need. The main solution file is mostly used by the build server.
.slns are the only thing we haven't had problems with in tfs!

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