Easier TFS Build Definition Update - visual-studio-2010

I am new to a company which uses TFS as a source manager. Currently when we make a new branch we create a copy of an old Build, then manually go in and edit all the workspace file paths and process definitions to reflect the new version(ie: if it was a copy of a 1.2.0 build, we go in and manually replace all the 1.2.0's with 1.3.0's)
Since we have ~70 folders and ~150 required processes to build, this gets rather tiring, time comsuming, and is error prone. I've read that there is an API for TFS you can use- Is there a custom script I could write to replace all the old version #'s with the new ones?
Also, under 'Workspace' its not too bad because you can copy it into notepad and do a 'ctrl+h' to replace it- it's really the processes that are killing it.
-Thank you, Kurtis

I highly suggest you look at installing TFS Power tools. It has a clone feature for build definitions that makes this very easy to do. I don't know why it isn't built in, but the power tools are really great.
Power tools for TFS 2010 -
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f
For 2010 you might need this one instead, but you should check both out - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/16bafc63-0f20-4cc3-8b67-4e25d150102c

Related

Generate an installer

Over the years our InstallShield code has grown un-manageable and messy. We're about to design an InstallShield 2015 installation from scratch for a new major release, and I was wondering if there's any way to automatically capture a set of system changes to use as a cleaner starting point for developing a new install package. Ideally, I would like to turn on some capturing software, install the oldest release from which we support an upgrade, install the latest service packs, and then apply the manual changes that will get the new release running on the system. Then I would turn off the capturing software, and it would provide an InstallShield project pre-loaded with all the files and registry entries (GAC changes, .NET assemblies, etc) that were created as part of that install. Then I could add steps to delete those that we no longer needed and do some other clean-up and refinements. Does such a thing exist?
Yes, this is called a repackager most often, in the enterprise world where sys admin and packagers prepare applications for deployment on the company machines.
Flexera has one that can create a project for InstallShield, but it is sold together with their AdminStudio solution, which is not cheap.
We (at Caphyon) have a repackager included in Advanced Installer (the architect edition) which also requires you purchase license. And of course the generated project will be compatible only with Advanced Installer, where you can configure your installers as you wish.
I think there is also a free repackager, AppDeploy from Dell, but I never used it, so I don't know how accurate it is and if you can use the results created into InstallShield or if it generates directly an MSI.
If you started looking more careful you will probably find other repackager tools, but you should know that building such a tool is not an easy task so choose carefully. Also probably only the one from AdminStudio will be able to generate a project that can be read by InstallShield.
If you already have the source projects from the older editions I would personally not try using a repackager. Instead I would go for cleaning up all the configurations which you do not understand and re-build them from scratch.
A repackager as good as it can be still has some problems. It can capture incomplete data, for example if you have a custom action that runs different code based on the OS where the installer is running the repackager will capture only its effects on the OS where you run it. On another one might run differently and have another output.
Also if your installer has prerequisites and you run the repackager on a machine where those prerequisites are installed then the repackager will not capture anything related to this, so by accident you can forget to include required prerequisites in the new package.
There is also the things like meta-information which few repackagers can detect. For example files associations which are actually a set of file and registry entries connected together or environment variables, scheduled tasks, etc...
Most repackagers capture all this data and simply show it to you as configuration files and registry entries, instead of creating the correct entities in your projects, i.e. files associations, environment variables or scheduled tasks in their correspondent views.

Debugger always saves my project and I can't step back

I often need to return to a previous milestone.
There is a vicious cycle: my error is revealed only during debugging, but I can't step back because the debugger has saved my project.
In simple projects I always used to make a copy of my cpp file (just keep ctrl and drug your file a bit).
But now projects has become more complicated (with header files).
I have tried to use save solution as. But it seems as if it is just renaming the sln file without making a copy of the whole project.
So, what shall I do? Copy the whole project as I did with the file?
The question seems a bit clumsy but it really troubles me: what elegant decision is there?
You can use software versioning systems like SVN or Git to undo the savings and return to previous point in your project, also there are some extensions for visual studio like ankhsvn and Gitextention that you can use.
If you are using vs 2010, you can disable saving on build event from Tools>Options>Projects and Solutions>Build and Run

Renaming files: Visual Studio vs Version control

The problem with renaming files is that if you want to take advantage of Visual Studio refactoring, you really need to do it from inside Visual Studio.
But most (not all*) version control system also want to be the ones doing the renaming.
One solution is to use integrated source control, but this is not always available, and in some cases is pretty clunky.
I'd personally be more comfortable using source control separately, outside of Visual Studio, but I'm not sure how to manage this question of file renames.
So, for those of you that use Visual Studio, which source control do you use? Do you use a VS integration (which one?) and otherwise, how do you resolve this renaming problem?
(* git is smart enough to work it out for itself)
I use SVN (TortiseSVN as the client) and use the Repair Move command from the commit dialog heavily. This allows me to rename the files within VS and resolve the rename when I'm ready to commit to keep version history.
As far as using the VS integration, like you, I find all VS integration clunky and do not use it.
mercurial usually prefers to do the renaming via hg rename however it can also detect renames from an outside source by using hg addremove -s 100 (or less than 100 if you want to match a rename with alterations) so clearly you can let VS do the rename and get mercurial to catchup with addremove.
We use SVN (TortoiseSVN to be exact), and i am always bothered with the renaming problem. The simplest solution i've found is to remove the files from the project, rename them via TSVN and add them back to the project. You have to manually update includes for renamed header files, but this is relatively easy using find&replace.
We use Team Foundation Server, and it works with no problems. I've also found that moving to using a fully integrated client has improved my workflow, as I don't need to flip between applications just to do trivial tasks.
We develop "Plastic SCM" and the Visual Studio Package supports move operations. But I see your point, I'm getting more and more comfortable with the idea of not having plugins/packages and then have the version control working behind the scenes and simply detecting what happened without having to be "plugged in" into the IDE. In fact we're working on it for next release...
Besides the above advice, for Visual Studio 2008 I found that after making all global changes to any file being renamed from within VS, including right clicking the file and renaming it, as well as a global search and replace for all strings, replacing the old file name with the new file name, you must, if the file is the initial startup file, right click and select it as "set as default page". Otherwise you'll may well get the "The resource cannot be found." error on runtime.

Visual Source Safe - Removing files from web projects

I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible.
Currently our team has a VSS database where our projects are stored.
Developers grab the code and place on their localhost machine and develop locally.
Designated developer grabs latest version and pushes to development server.
The problem is, when a file is removed from the project (by deleting it in VS2008) then the next time another developer (not the one who deleted it) checks in, it prompts them to check in those deleted files because they still have a copy on their local machine.
Is there a way around this? To have VSS instruct the client machine to remove these files and not prompt them to check back in? What is the preferred approach for this?
Edit Note(s):
I agree SVN is better than VSS
I agree Web Application project is better than Web Site project
Problem: This same thing happens with files which are removed from class libraries.
You number one way around this is to stop using web site projects. Web Site Projects cause visual studio to automatically add anything it finds in the project path to the project.
Instead, move to Web Application Projects which don't have this behavior problem.
Web Site projects are good for single person developments.
UPDATE:
VB shops from the days gone past had similiar issues in that whatever they had installed affected the build process. You might take a page from their playbook and have a "clean" build machine. Prior to doing a deployment you would delete all of the project folders, then do a get latest. This way you would be sure that the only thing deployed is what you have in source control.
Incidentally, this is also how the TFS Build server works. It deletes the workspace, then creates a new one and downloads the necessary project files.
Further, you might consider using something like Cruise Control to handle builds.
Maybe the dev should take care to only check in or add things that they have been working on. Its kind of sloppy if they are adding things that they were not even using.
Your best solution would be to switch to a better version control system, like SVN.
At my job we recently acquired a project from an outsourcing company who did use VSS as their version control. We were able to import all of the change history into SVN from VSS, and get up and running pretty quickly with SVN at that point.
And with SVN, you can set up ignores for files and folders, so the files in your web projects dont get put into SVN and the ignore attributes are checked out onto each developer's machine
I believe we used VSSMigrate to do the migration to SVN http://www.poweradmin.com/sourcecode/vssmigrate.aspx
VSS is an awful versioning system and you should switch to SVN but that's got nothing to do with the crux of the problem. The project file contains references to what files are actually part of the project. If the visual studio project isn't checked in along with the changes to it, theres no way for any other developer to be fully updated hence queries to delete files when they grab the latest from VSS. From there you've got multiple choices...
Make the vbproj part of the repository. Any project level changes will be part of the commit and other developers can be notified. Problem here is it's also going to be on the dev server. Ideally you could use near the same process to deploy to dev as you would to deploy as release. This leads into the other way...
SVN gives you hooks for almost all major events, where hooks are literally just a properly named batch file / exe. For your purposes, you could use a post-commit hook to push the appropriate files, say via ftp, to the server on every commit. File problems solved, and more importantly closer towards the concept of continuous integration.
Something you may want to consider doing:
Get Latest (Recursive)
Check In ...
Its a manual process, but it may give you the desired result, plus if VS talks about deleted files, you know they should be deleted from the local machine in step 1.

Perforce integration with visual studio without project files being checked in to perforce

I am working on a large source base (approx 15K files) decomposed into about 25 projects. I want to keep the source in perforce (and am evaluating perforce to that end) but due to complications in the setup it isn't possible for me to keep the visual studio projects in source control, I know in theory the answer to this is to check the projects in, but that isn't feasible (we would end up with projects for several versions of VS checked in, and additionally several variants of each of these, instead they are generated automatically and this setup works very well).
Is there a way to get VS to checkout files for editing as it goes without adding the project to perforce, to avoid the user having to go to the perforce client and manually check out each file for editing as they go? Alternatively (and even better) is there a way to get VS to recognise that the files in a project are under source control, without having to add the project to source control also?
I know we could also take the tack of having every user check out for editing all files they might potentially want to edit ahead of time, then revert unmodified files before submitting their changes, is there a performance penalty in perforce in taking this approach?
In your case, I'd suggest not using the visual studio integration for Perforce.
You can either add Perforce commands to the Tools Menu, or try Nifty Perforce from Google:
http://code.google.com/p/niftyplugins/
One option is to use Perforce as if you were disconnected from the server and reconcile your changes later, rather than telling Perforce everything you do before you do it. (This is roughly equivalent to the workflow in CVS or Subversion.) You would synchronize your working copy, go off and develop, and then ask Perforce to figure out what you did while it wasn't watching.
Perforce has a nice document describing the process: Working Disconnected From The Perforce Server
One thing the document doesn't mention is the allwrite clientspec attribute, which marks all files in your working directory as writable instead of only the files you have checked out.
For the sake of completeness: There is a new tool for your wish called P4VS. I like it better that P4SCC which never worked for me as I wanted.

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