Sometimes I open a solution, make some change, compile, commit, deploy the software and only later realize that some colleague made a change that is not included in my build, since I forgot to "Update to Latest Version" first.
What I'd like is the following: When opening a solution, AnkhSVN should check whether my version is up-to-date and recommend that I update if it isn't.
I'd send a feature request, but since AnkhSVN has such a lot of features and this is such an obviously useful one (at least to me), I actually assume that this feature is already there and that I missed it when going through the AnhkSVN configuration options.
Is this feature there? If yes, how do I activate it?
This feature is indeed already there. Go to View -> Pending Changes, then click on the clock symbol (Recent Changes). Here check the "Refresh every...." checkbox and select a timespan. Files that are changed on the server and are not updated yet are shown in this view now.
Related
I was working on a project, and I didn't get the latest version before I submitted my changes, and someone had just submitted some updates to the project. I know I can go to history, right click on the version I want, and choose "Get This Version," but This doesn't let me choose between changes in the two versions. I usually have in the past just copied all of the code I want, but this is very tedious. I know I can click on the files it shows in Changeset Details, and it will show the difference in code, but there's no way to choose the code I want. What would be the best way to get the changes in code that I want?
When several people are working concurrently on a file, you may not be able to ensure that you're always working on the latest version. But you can check in your file no matter what has been modified by others. TFS will provides information and tool to help you resolve conflicts.
TFS will automaticlly compare your loacl verison with the latest version on server.You can choose which you want to keep.
By default, the window shows only the conflicts caused by the most recent operation you attempted. When the window is in this state, a message appears that begins: Path filter applied. To show all conflicts in your workspace, choose Get All Conflicts. A message that begins with: n Conflict(s) appears. You can also use Refresh, if new conflicts might have occurred. To get more information, reference https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181432.aspx
I've been bumping into an issue lately where developers on our team (mostly me) have a tendency to open a project and forget to Get Latest Version before coding and we end up making new changes to old code.
It'd be nice if Visual Studio would know that I'm about to make new changes on old code and either warn me or automatically grab the latest version for me.
Is this possible?
EDIT: I forgot to mention I'm using TFS
Good question, and fortunately for you the answer is 'yes' (since you're using TFS as specified in your comment).
Go to Tools > Options > Source Control (on the left) > Environment and ensure 'Get everything when a solution or project is opened' is checked.
I must add, though, settings like this shouldn't really be used as a substitute for good habits and best practices. You and your team should be aware of the importance of 'get latest' to the point whereby you want to get latest and don't want to work without it (if you're at that stage in the project).
Potential 'downsides' to this:
On the odd occasion, you'll hear our team members say "don't get latest yet". Because of a bad check-in they've made. If they break the build - you'll get that broken build. Not an ideal scenario, it should never happen, but the reality is that it does. You lose an element of that control if it does it automatically.
Not to mention the fact that if your team are forgetting to get latest, there's an even bigger chance of them forgetting to check the changeset for potential issues. The 'resolve conflict' dialog doesn't always highlight every issue you need to be aware of.
I suppose a really minor downside could also be the start-up time of the project (one of the reasons Microsoft more recently got rid of this feature as you mentioned). You're not just opening a solution anymore, you're opening it and waiting for a get latest. Which could, then, require further attention (conflict resolution).
I'm possibly rambling now - but what about when you take on juniors that might not be familiar with source control concepts such as get latest? If it's always been taken care of, they might miss a trick. For example, hypothetically, VS opens but fails to connect to the TFS server as it's temporarily down. Could this cause an already forgetful team to explicitly get latest at a later date?
I'm developing in Visual Studio 2005, using TFS as the source control. Whenever I haven't been working on the solution for a while, I always do a recursive Get Latest in Solution Explorer.
However, this doesn't always seem to work. If I know I don't have the latest version of a file, even right-clicking this (in Solution Explorer), choosing Get Specific Version and ticking the "Force get" box doesn't work.
I seem to need to open up the TFS Source Control window, and there force a Get of the file in question.
Also, the Solution Explorer often has the little "checked out to someone else" icon next to files, but when I check in Source Control, they're not checked out at all!
I'd just like to know if these problems are widespread, whether they persist in VS2008 (I haven't used TFS for a big project in 2008 yet), and if there are any fixes or workarounds.
1) I would not make a habit out of Get Latest from Solution Explorer. Even if it always worked 100% bug free, it is far slower and less reliable than doing it from the command line or Source Control Explorer. SlnExp has to crawl your whole project structure and issue non-recursive calls...pseudo algorithm:
parse sln file
foreach project in sln
TFS_GET makefile
parse makefile
enumerate sourcefiles[]
TFS_GET sourcefiles[]
loop
SCE requires no parsing and issues one single recursive webservice call. In addition to the performance gain, this is much safer:
(a) Build-time dependencies aren't always part of a project's file list. Executable tools, 3rd party assemblies, and deployment scripts are all common examples. SCE will download them, SlnExp won't.
(b) Scoping Get calls down to specific files won't yield the expected result when a file is renamed or moved. At best, the "old" name is deleted from disk; at worst, nothing appears to happen at all. (this may be the cause of the bug you reported) In order for a file to truly be renamed/moved in sync with the server, the old & new paths must both be inside the scope of the Get.
2) There have been many bug fixes to the SlnExp "glyphs" over the years. I won't claim that VS2008 SP1 is perfect in this regard but it is definitely improved.
Sometimes Get specific version even checking both checkboxes won't get you the latest file. Most commonly what happens is that you've made a change to a file, and you want to undo those changes by re-getting the latest version. Well... that's what Undo pending changes is for and not the purpose of Get specific version.
If in doubt:
undo pending check in on the file(s) before you do 'get latest'
do a compare afterwards to make sure your file matches the expected version
run a recursive 'compare' on your whole project afterwards to see what's different
keep an eye on pending changes window and sometimes you may need to check 'take server version' to resolve an incompatible pending change
And this one's my favorite that I just discovered :
check the Output window for messages such as this :
Warning - Unable to refresh R:\TFS-PROJECTS\www.example.com\ExampleMVC\Example MVC\Example MVC.csproj because you have a pending edit.
Yes this critical message appears in the output window. No other notifications!
Nothing in pending changes and no other dialog message telling you that the file you just requested explicitly was not retrieved! And yes - you resolve this by just running Undo pending changes and getting the file.
I'm using VisualSVN with my Visual Studio 2008 and I have to run some sort of commit monitor in the tray area to see if the local copy of project is out of date.
I have two problems with that:
I hate to have it in two places, I want to see that as an icon in my VS,
The commit monitor software keeps an eye on several projects, when I work on project 1 (which VS knows about), I'm not interested in other projects.
I couldn't find any addons for Visual Studio to do that and was wondering if anyone knows about anything good.
Generally, you have 2 options (besides running commitmonitor as you already do):
run update before you start to change something
ignore it all and merge with any updates when you want to commit.
SVN's really designed around the 'wait until you're ready and merge it all together' model, as there's no guarantee that even if you update your working copy immediately before starting to modify it, someone won't commit changes before you've had a chance to commit. So, let the system do the work for you.
The ultimate alternative if you are worried about conflicts is to use the svn:needs-lock property which means you will have to get a lock on any file you modify before modifying it, and you won't be able to get a lock on a file someone else is modifying.
You might like to ask the VisualSVN people if they'd add an option to check the repository when a project is loaded by VS (or run AnkhSVN and implement this feature yourself).
Work has started in AnkhSVN in this direction, we started to implement the 'Synchronize View' that's also used in Eclipse/Subclipse. The things still missing are: Scheduled checking of the repository, and maybe a notification inside VS to tell you that something has changed.
Right now you can manually refresh this view to see local and remote changes (and merges which can be potential conflicts). Patches are welcome to extend this feature :-)
I'm assuming VisualSVN is your "server" (even if running on the same machine).
AnkhSVN is a good Visual Studio Integrated SVN Client.
I'm using Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0.
I have them integrated but when I check out a Project and then try to edit a module in that project it's locked and I have to manually right-click on it and do a Check Out to unlock it.
I thought there was a way to have VSS automatically check out the file for editing.
Any suggestions?
I agree with kris here. Now I know that a bunch of folks saying your "software stinks" doesn't really answer your question. But there is a world of difference between a check out style source control and a file locking system like Source safe. The general consensus is that Check out systems are far superior.
With check out, what you do is you check out the project from your repository. All the files are editable. You work on your project as normally. Then before you checkin you do another update. If anybody else in your team did a update the software will automatically merge in the changes into your code. You will have a chance to review the merges and resolve any conflicts. After the update you can then check in your changes which everyone else can retrieve.
The big scary part is the merging part. Back when CVS and subversion where just command line tools it was a little scary as it was a pain to retrieve what happened with the merging. But with today's tools like Tortoise is all visual. In the last couple of years I can't think of any instance where a automatic merge failed. Any conflicts (basically two people edit the same line of code) are display right here for you to resolve.
Subversion
Tortoise SVN
There is an option in SourceSafe under the "Local Files" tab labeled "Use read-only flag for files that are not checked out". By default this option is selected, but if you unselect it, you will be able to edit any file in the project without checking it out.
Once you uncheck the option, you can get the latest version of a project to remove the read-only flag from all the files.
When you check out a file, you will be warned that there is a writable copy of the file in your working folder, at which time you can replace it with the version in the SourceSafe database.
I never figured out a way to do this. It was always a huge pain. Sorry for posting a negative answer, but I figured that you might want to know that you aren't alone in hating this, but that there wasn't an immediate and obvious answer. I'll be following this question along with you in case someone out there does know of a solution...
I don't think it is possible to do this (at least it wasn't when we used VSS eight years ago), but while you are experiencing the pain of a check out styled source control, run - don't walk, to some real, non-locking style source control solution. SVN, CVS, Git, Mecruial, anything that doesn't lock files, and doesn't leave your source in a proprietary file sytem. We switched to CVS eight years ago because we lost all of our source history (the code was checkout out so it was retrievable), due to a VSS glitch. Best thing we ever did, made collaboration ten times easier. Now CVS isn't the best solution (it was the most reasonable solution for windows back then), but anything is better than VSS.
Best solution I found was to check out all the files. Took a bit of poking around to figure out how to do that. Here's how:
How to check out all VB6 Project files from VSS?
when I check out a Project and then
try to edit a module in that project
it's locked and I have to manually
right-click on it and do a Check Out
to unlock it
Like it or not, it works that way by design i.e. you can check out all the files but you have to explicitly choose to do so, rather than being the default option. I guess that's because checking out all modules (class modules, forms, usercontrols, etc) locks out all other users from the entire project, which is normally undesirable in a team collaboration environment.