I'm working on cross-platform plugins for MvvmCross. Most of the time is spent recreating the same structure of projects over and over again, including nuget entries, changing output directories, adding files, etc. How do I automatically create all these projects in one swoop? Ideally, I would just say Add New Plugin, enter "Stopwatch" and have everything automatically create.
#Stuart has already commented but the tool recommended is what you want so I'll give it as an answer.
I've been using NinjaCoder (a Visual Studio Addin for MvvmCross) for my recent projects and it pretty much covers everything you could need to create a solution out the box. It was created by Adrian Sudbury and it can be downloaded from here.
Tutorial links can be found on the download page, but if not the blog posts regarding views, viewmodels and plugins can be found here.
Related
I am trying to run multiple apps with the same code, the only differences are application names, icons and the splashscreen.
I am already 100 % sure that my approach must be complete crap, but here is my approach:
I copied the excisting project specific configuring files, changed all file names to the new project, replaced references inside these files and imported this project back to the solution, because creating a complete new product within the solutions ignores all yet created files so I wanted to save some time. Now have 1 solution (I thought of this as the product) and 1 projekt for each customer, all targets sharing all code, except the project configs with the ids, names and icons etc..
But when I try to build any of the project I get these errors
Error occurred while restoring NuGet packages:
The process cannot access the file
'C:\...\project.lock.json'
because it is being used by another process.
Or the assembly is used by another application.
So, this can't be the right way to do what I want to do by Visual Studio, I'm looking for the right way to handle 1 base-product but many customer-specific-apps with Visual Studio 2015.
Sadly I couldn't find any tutorial for that yet.
Maybe I'm searching with the wrong description or naming, I thought of projects as targets in Xcode.
A link to a proper tutorial would already do the job for me.
Thanks!
According to your description, I think what you want is building multiple branded apps from a single Visual Studio solution. If so, here is a nice article: Multi-Branded Apps in Visual Studio (Windows 10 UWP) you can refer to.
The key point here is using separate build configurations for each app and then using Pre-build commands to create the app package.
For more info, please see Understanding Build Configurations and Specifying Custom Build Events in Visual Studio.
I have a ASP.NET project that consists of many C# libraries in addition to the web project. The problem (for some reason) is that all projects that make up the web application are NOT added into one solution within a same visual studio. Instead, most projects are separated within individual visual studio. All projects are stored in source control, and shared by other developers.
Thus, the question is that how to find usage of any code, like "Find Usage" via Resharper. Is there any tools or tricks that allows me to do that like Resharper's Find Usage.
Any advice?
It looks like you're in something of a bind. My suggestion would be to simply make your own source control branch, and in that branch, you can create a new SLN file, add all of the projects, replace their binary project references by project references and then call Find Usages. Then, if you need to do any changes on the basis of Find Usage info, simply merge those in without merging PROJ or SLN files.
If these library projects are referenced as DLL files rather than the project references the only way is to open all the one-project solutions and search there by 'text'. There are some tips/tricks, which could simplify navigation a bit.
P.S. The situation you described looks far from convenient. I agree with Dmitri - you might consider to discuss with your team to switch onto referencing projects rather than using binaries. Once you switch each developer will be able to create local either solutions with the projects involved, or maybe you will agree on new common source controlled solutions.
So I am working on a solution with a lot of projects with multiple developers using SVN. There are some projects that are specific for me that I want loaded but for others they might not be relevant.
So my question is, where does Visual Studio store information about a project begin loaded and what is the proper way to commit project/solution settings with out ruining it for others?
An example could be that I just added a new project to the solution and I want to commit these changes, but I don't want to commit whether or not a project is loaded/reloaded (Since other developers have to reload them again).
EDIT: I found the answer here When I unload projects in visual studio, where does VS save this setting?
When you add projects to a solution, they will get loaded when the solution opens.
If using source control, if such a solution is updated and contains new projects, they will get loaded.
One way of dealing with this is to create multiple solutions - solutions that only have relevant projects. These solutions can be part of source control, but don't have to, though if you don't add them to source control you risk having projects in source control that only you have a solution reference to.
We are finally getting a source control system in place at work and I've been in charge of setting it up. I've read that it's usually good practice to not include binaries in source control so I haven't. However, we have two all-purpose utility projects (each in their own solution) that generate utility .dll's which are included in almost all of our other projects (all each in their own separate solutions). We add references to the utility dll from our projects.
I would like to have our solutions set up in such a way that if the reference dll isn't built, the solution will build the dll for itself, much in the same way a make file checks for its dependencies and builds them when they're out of date or missing.
I'm new to build processes with VS so try to keep the answers simple. Any links to general build process overview tutorials would be great too. Googleing for VS references returns a bunch of how-to add references links which is not exactly what I want.
Answer: (3 step process) Add a project reference, not a binary reference by right clicking on the solution, and adding an existing project. Then under the project tab, select project dependencies and modify the project so that one project depends on another. Finally, delete any old reference to the binary and re-add the reference using the project tab in the Add references dialog box.
Where I work we typically have project references rather than binary references (as we used to a while ago). When you include a project reference, the dll will build along with the rest of your app.
The only time we go back to binary references is when we are in between Visual Studio releases (e.g. 1 project is in 2010 and everything else is in 2008. The 2010 project will have to use a binary reference for a couple of months until everyone else catches up... Project incompatibility seems to be a Visual Studio limitation that shouldn't exist).
EDIT
To add a project reference right click the solution and click Add and finally "Existing Project." Make sure that the utility projects are also under source control, and make sure that the workspaces are set up correctly or other people will not be able to open up the projects correctly!
In Eclipse, I have a workspace that contains all of my projects. Each project builds and compiles separately. A project does not interact with another project.
How does this relate to Visual Studio and Projects/Solutions there?
A VS project is it's own entity. It will build and compile by itself. A Solution is just a way to contain multiple projects. The projects don't necessarily need the other projects to compile (though, they can depend on the other projects).
This just lets you conceptually group projects together into one Big Project. For instance, you can have a separate testing project. It depends on the code from the actual project, and should be kept together with the actual project, but it does not need to be in the same exe/dll.
Each VS project builds a single EXE or DLL. The solution is just a collection of related projects.
So VS project:Eclipse project::VS solution:Eclipse workspace.
Another way to look at it is, a solution is a container for projects. For most of my work , I create each tier as a project within a solution so my tree looks like:
My Web App or Win App
Presentation Layer
files...
Business Layer
files...
Data Access
files
Your mileage may vary
#Thomas Owens:
Yes, some (most?) people using Eclipse have more than one workspace. It's what surprised me the most when I first started using Eclipse, so I'm replying here to make this comment more visible.
The thing that may be throwing you off is the following:
In VS2003, everything had a Project file and a Solution file. If you had a Solution with one Project, you could open the Solution and see the one Project. If you opened the Project, it would try and create a new Solution file to contain the Project. But web projects and Winform projects all had Projects and Solutions.
In VS2005 this changed a bit - by default now, Web projects no longer had Project files. They had received feedback from some web developers that didn't like Project files - their take was that if a file is in the directory, it's part of the app. After VS2005 shipped, they got more feedback from developers who did like the Project file notion, so they patched it back in. This is "Web Site" versus "Web Application" in VS2005 (and I can't remember which is which now).
In addition, in VS2005, if you have a Solution open with only one Project, you won't see in the Solution Explorer that there's even a Solution at all, you'll only see the Project (as if it was not in a Solution). Only after adding the second Project will you see that there's a Solution containing them both.
So basically you were on the right track - Solutions and Projects work the same in Visual Studio as they did in Eclipse, it's just some quirks that make things confusing.
A Solution has 0 or many Projects...
There are way too many kinds of web projects in Visual Studio 2008. There are Web Site Projects vs. Web Application Projects and they limit you in different ways. It's a good example of Microsoft providing too many choices instead of focusing on one strong solution. Even within the Web site Project option, there are at least 3 different ways to compile your application.
I found that not always seeing the solution in the Solution Explorer to be irritating. There is a setting in Options->Projects and Solutions->General called "Always Show Solution" which was handy.