Is there a Add-In or a non default setting to automaticly backup your source files in Visual Studio?
I ask this, because my PC crashed into a BSOD whilst stopping debugging of a Project which used the Ping class. (Bug was reported 4 years ago to ms...) And my main file was filled with nuls (as n++ showed).
So I looked into the myDocuments (as suggested elsewhere) folder just to find nothing, and yes the setting is enabled. So now I have to use a 2 hour old file which gdrive gave me.
My idea of such a backup mechanism would be that like every five minutes changed files will be backuped into a custom directory. Those backups should remain until the backup files get too old or too much storage is used.
I'm using Visual Studio 2013 Community edition on Win 7x64.
I would recommend using some sort of hosted source control for backing up your work, something like like GitHub or Visual Studio Online.
Related
I'm having an issue where Visual Studio 2012 hangs for way longer than it should whenever I do a manual save. Previously it seemed to do this randomly, but I noticed that it was whenever it was doing an automatic save to the backup recovery files. I have since disabled the AutoRecover system.
By using sysinternals Process Monitor, I learned that VS2012 is trying to access a network location that no longer exists, and not just when trying to save, but when starting up, etc. Any time it is trying to access the .../My Documents/Visual Studio 2012/ directory, it's looking in the wrong place:
What happened I believe is that when I originally installed 2012, \govstor-01 was the name of one of our servers. I went back to using VS2010 for a while, and during that time our IT/Network guys renamed that server (simply removed the -01).
My question is: Where is VS2012 saving that path and how do I change it? It doesn't seem to be a system related thing because VS2010 and VS2013 RC both work perfectly fine so I'm not sure why 2012 is stuck with outdated 'hooks'. Like I said, I disabled the AutoRecovery feature but it still seems to be trying to access that directory when doing a manual save.
Quick Edit: I should note that I have tried reinstalling VS2012, as well as performing the 'Reset all settings' in the Import and Export Settings Wizard.
As noted, there are several settings in Visual Studio that can refer to the original Documents directory. Short from hunting through the Tools + Options settings, the easiest way to find them back is by searching the registry with Regedit.exe for the old server name. And editing the value you find to now refer to the new server name. Restart VS and you should be back in business.
Ok, before I explain in detail, here's my (very odd) setup:
Hardware: iMac
OS: Mountain Lion
Software:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010
Source Control (Windows): Team Foundation Server
So here's my dilemma.
I looooove Sublime 2. However, being a Microsoft shop at my workplace, I have no choice but to deal with TFS. I don't do a lot of back-end coding, I'm a front-end guy and don't need all the hefty class and structure tracking built into Visual Studio, so Sublime is perfect for me.
One of the things I love about Sublime is that I can hit cmd+p and pull up any file immediately. The alternative is spending several minutes sifting through our file structure to locate the same file (we have a massive project structure...it's a beast).
Unfortunately, I can't just tap cmd+p and pull up any file...I can...but after editing it, I hit save and "uh oh! file isn't checked out, it's read only". I then have to switch spaces, spend several minutes sifting through directories to locate that same file I worked on, and check it out. Switch back, save, and then check it in. It wastes a lot of my time and defeats the time-saving benefits of Sublime's file searching.
What I'd like to know is if there's an easier way to accomplish this. I've tried a few things and none have panned out. I found a plugin that integrates TFS with Sublime - but that only works for Windows. I tried using Eclipse with a TFS plugin, but I still have to browse through a massive directory structure to check out the file in Eclipse before editing it in Sublime.
Is there any way to streamline this process better? I know it might sound silly to go through such extremes to save a minute or two here & there, but when I do this hundreds of times a day, it starts to save a LOT of time!
Thanks in advance to the community for any help on this!
If you can persuade your TFS Admin team to upgrade to TFS 2012 you will have your solution. TFS 2012 supports "Local Workspace" which does not keep files read-only on disk. You download your source code once through Visual Studio or Eclipse and keep working in ANY editor you want. TFS Client tracks changes on the file system and you just need VS or Eclipse to check-in your work at the end of the day.
For TFS 2008 and 2010 you have to check-out your files manually or with the help of a supported IDE. Those versions only support "server workspace"s and that flavour of workspace keeps all files on disk as read-only.
You might have another chance with 2008 or 2010 tough. TFS 2008 and TFS 2010 on Windows platform supports offline working, which temporarily disconnects your workspace from the server to do your work. Then at the end of the day you go back online and TFS client tries to "detect" what changes were made when you were offline and lets you check them in. This blog post says Team Explorer Everywhere supports offline work. You might need to remove read-only flags of files manually. Offline working is not perfect even on Windows platform and you need to be careful until you get used to it but I believe it is worth giving a shot.
If upgrading to TFS 2012 is an option then you probably want to consider it.
TFS2012 with local workspaces no longer require files to be checked out in visual studio first (files are no longer marked as readonly, and vs detects changes from other programs). This will get rid of one of your alt-tabs to windows.
You'd still have to alt-tab back to check in, you could potentially use a commandline "tf checkin" if you don't want to keep visual studio open.
So after trying several suggestions from here, among a few I found elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the best setup (for me) is as follows:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Editor (PC): Sublime 2 with TFS plugin
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010 Source Control
(Windows): Team Foundation Server
So as you can see I updated my existing setup with one slight tweak. On my Windows side, I installed Sublime 2 and installed the TFS plugin. If I want to check out a file, I switch to windows, search for the file, check it out via Sublime's TFS plugin, then switch back to the Mac. It's certainly not ideal, and requires an extra step, but it seems to work the best for me and is faster than using Visual Studio to check in/out.
If anyone comes up with a more elegant setup (aside from using TFS 2012 - which thankfully is coming for my organization), I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, I hope this helps anyone else who might be using a setup similar to mine.
For some reason, Visual Studio 2008 keeps adding three folders to my solution folder. I always have to delete them so I don't accidentally add them to SVN. How do I prevent these from being created? This happens about once every couple weeks, but I haven't figured out when it happens. We're probably going to convert all of our projects to Visual Studio 2010 later this year, but in the mean time, I'd like to figure this out.
If anyone knows how to write a Windows folder (or file) creation listener, I'll be able to track this down faster. I'm imagining a Windows Service that displays a popup when a folder gets created somewhere in the Windows file system, and it's constantly listening. I've had other situations where folders and files get created in Windows (in different project types in Visual Studio 2008 or Windows for that matter), so that might be a cool resource to have in the arsenal.
That directory is probably set as your VS Projects location. If you open Tools>Options and then click Projects and Solutions, it should show you the folder paths. VS will recreate these paths if you delete them.
After installing VS, they are usually set to something like:
C:\Users\username\Documents\Visual Studio 2010
My visual studio 2010 crashed when some carelessness [bit of madness] mistakenly pressed start button and my Acer timeline got unstable. Two projects where open at the time, one in visual studio 2005 [I have both 2005 and 2010 installed]. Unfortunately I lost all the codes I had done at the time along with those coded even weeks before. Now the project files in both the solutions are those weeks older. Amazingly, the .aspx pages are intact and .cs files are gone.
What can be done to get the lost data? Help please.
Thanks.
Guys TAKE CARE if your Visual Studio crashes, you need to check the backup BEFORE you restart Visual Studio and check if your files are ok! Many people complain that they lost work after a crash, and then they restart Visual Studio, and upon discovering that their code cannot be found in Visual Studio they then check the backup at the location
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Backup Files\\
The order is important. Check the backup FIRST, before restarting Visual Studio. If you start Visual Studio and then open your old project it's probable that Visual Studio will overwrite the backup files for that project.
Securing the backup is your FIRST concern. Then start Visual Studio and open your project to see how much damage there is.
You can check:
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Backup Files\<ProjectName>\
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Backup Files\<ProjectName>\
More information can be found here:
Visual Studio 2010 AutoRecover Feature
I just had the same experience -- losing a source file during a BSOD. Very annoying!
No backup file could be found, and I searched the hard drive for a file containing the class name, but no backup was unturned.
However I was able to get back something resembling my code by decompiling a DLL from the bin/Debug folder using DotPeek. So if you had previously compiled your code successfully, you can get the code (without comments, and with some weird local variable names, etc) via decompilation.
I Had the same problem, I lost code due to BSOD.
the backup folder should store files not saved until they are saved whenever you save the files there are deleted.
I think that maybe they don't remain after a restart as it was empty in my case.
A very good file recovery tool is Recuva. It helped me once, didn't help me second time, though, because I noticed the data loss too late, and all recoverable data got overwritten.
So I used DotPeek, though you'll have to do a lot of work on the disassembled files, they are pretty weird.
Now I put my source tree in Google Drive, because it has file versions and keeps deleted files. Dropbox would do, too.
Git or any other VCS are not solution for this thing, because you cannot have crazy amount of meaningless commits.
Recently, the SourceSafe integration into visual studio has started to perform badly because we have moved, and the SourceSafe "server" is located across a VPN which goes across a slow connection. This has made loading large projects in visual c++ 6 take 5+ minutes because it has to talk to the "server" for each project. Also, there are some bugs that are dangerous in the integration (the auto-checkout of certain shared projects will do a get latest on the wrong version of a branched file). This has caused me to want to disable the SourceSafe integration, however I have not found any menu option or uninstall option. Google has reported a few registry tweaks, but none of them seemed to work.
Does anyone know of an easy way to remove the SourceSafe integration from Visual C++ 6, without uninstalling SourceSafe altogether?
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236399:
Source code control software, such as
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, that
integrates with the Visual C++
integrated development environment
(IDE) can be configured to connect to
a source code server during Visual C++
startup. In such cases, a loss in
network connectivity will cause Visual
C++ to start up very slowly. To
improve performance, either ensure
proper network connectivity or disable
the source code control software
integration with the Visual C++ IDE.
To do the latter, quit Visual C++, and
then use RegEdit.Exe to locate the
following registry key and set its
Disabled value to (DWORD) 0x00000001:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Open the .dsp and .dsw file in a text editor, and remove the respective entries from the .dsp and the .dsw file. Also, delete the .scc files.
There is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article about how to do exactly this.
The gist of it is that you must manually edit the .dsw and .dsp files in a text editor, and remove a few other files lying around. See the article for more details.
If the solutions mentioned above fail for you do this:
Rename folder: \Program Files\Microsoft\%vs%\Common7\IDE\VS SCC
VS will complain once about plug in not being there and you say "Yes" to ignore it in perpetuity.
All files “got latest,” “read only,” and edited in VS, will make VS complain and offer to “override”, which works fine for me.
What do you gain:
Open VSS-linked solutions quickly without VS matching contents to VSS server.
Open VSS-linked solutions and EDIT the files at will without being bogged down in “check out” bs.
This makes using other distributed source control system on top of project tree with VSS bindings painless.
VSS client still works by itself just fine, including diff, checkout, checkin.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Its working .....Thanks Ajay
What has worked for us, and is much easier, requires no registry/file editing by hand, and safer I think is this:
1) Exit Visual Studio completely.
2) Disconnect from the network (unplug the cable and turn off wireless, or disable the network adapters)
3) Open the VS6 workspace (DSW) for the project. When it starts up it will find it cannot connect with the VSS database it wants to and ask you about that...
4) Tell VS to never try to reconnect to the source control db in the future.
5) Done... VS does all the changes to THAT WORKSPACE/PROJECT setup for you. You are not disconnecting VS from source control in general (like a registry edit would do) and your not manually editing files.