How do I create a Visual Studio Project for Development on my Local PC that links to Existing files and folders on a Server?
My employer has a large website. Most of that girth (close to 100 GB) is contributed to Portable and Image document (i.e. PDF and JPEG) files, but there are also numerous web files (.html, .aspx, .php, etc).
We have the following folders:
a WORKING folder that contains everything that is "Live" on our web server.
a BETA folder that contains newest technologies that are being tested and tried.
a DEVELOPMENT folder that contains numerous copies of projects that are being worked on by the different developers.
Developers are allowed to use whatever tools they prefer, so we have people who develop using Notepad++, Dreamweaver, Komodo, Zend Studio, and (now) Visual Studio.
It is NOT OK for me to create Visual Studio Projects for myself on the network servers. Other developers using other tools are not creating solution files or \bin and \obj folders on the servers, and I certainly should not be either.
So, to work on a file in Visual Studio, I use Windows Explorer to browse to the location, then I open it in the IDE.
However, this causes me to lose a lot of the power of Visual Studio - particularly if other classes used in this file, because I would have no access to the Intellisense for that class and I cannot simply Right-Click and go to definition.
Also, since each development environment is so large, I can not copy them to my laptop with its high tech 125 GB Solid State Drive (should be interesting to read that in a couple of years).
What I would like to do is create the Visual Studio Projects on my local drive, and then have them reference the files and folders on our network.
I've looked and found these similar questions, but my goal is slightly different:
Working efficiently on remote projects in Visual Studio
How do I add an existing directory tree to a project in Visual Studio?
How to "Add Existing Item" an entire directory structure in Visual Studio?
These are all great topics, but none of them show a way to create a local project that uses remote files.
It would seem that developers in large company teams would have already developed a way to do this, and that I just do not know what it is called.
I have found a way to do this!
For a long time, I was working with 2 sets of folders. One for our repository and one for Visual Studio.
I'd make changes in Visual Studio, then copy those working files over to the repository folder.
That was time consuming! Very.
Here is how I found to fix it: Open the Visual Studio Project file (*.csproj, *.vbproj, or *.phpproj) in NOTEPAD with Visual Studio closed.
Locate the <ItemGroup> tab, and change every path to be from the one shown to one that uses a relative path to get to the actual files.
Notepad's Replace... CTRL+H will save you hours here!
It makes a funky looking project environment, but it works!
If this helps anyone else or if it were even something you didn't know you could do to manipulate Visual Studio, kindly vote it up.
Related
I use Mac, my friend uses Windows. We want to collaborate on a Unity project, had setup repo in Plastic SCM. He uses Visual Studio being extremely happy with the amount of features and convenience. We had an idea for me to try Visual Studio for Mac (I normally use VS Code). I thought: why not? When in Rome...
It turned out we can't collab like that? My understanding is:
Visual Studio for Mac requires .csproj or .sln file to open a directory with a project
These files are not supposed to be commited to a remote, shared repositry - .csproj contains local paths etc.
Without those files in the repo I can't open the project in VS for Mac (!), let alone develop it
I would expect the .csproj file or whatever to contain all Unity files + others, for example .editorconfig, which is important for synchronizing code formating between us.
I can generate my own .csproj file in Unity, however it's ignoring .editorconfig
I also don't want to start a new project via VS for Mac, which would create .sln and .csproj files. We already have a project on Plastic SCM
Therefore there is no option to share a repo that can be developed in his Windows + Visual Studio and mine Mac + VS for Mac envs.
Am I correct or am I missing something?
I have a peculiar problem where all but 1 of my projects are showing the Mercurial plug-ins for my solution correctly.
All the projects have been committed in my mercurial repository already.
The icons for the problematic project actually shows up correctly in another solution that includes it.
Fixes I've tried so far:
Recreate the Solution file from scratch.
Remove/Add Project again.
File compared csproj & sln files between the working and non working solutions.
I'm using Visual Studio 2015.
Has anyone come across this problem before?
It turns out I had to delete the hidden directories under the project folder that pertains to a different source control system (.svn).
It seems like the Mercurial add-on and/or Visual Studio gets confused if it sees more than 1 hidden folders under the project directory.
I have a Visual Studio "solution" which contains a Web application project (among a few other projects). Visual studio "typical" setup seems to be to insist that the output directory for binaries is smack in the root of the project source directory. In particular, each time the web application project is opened, Visual Studio will reset the physical path of the IIS virtual directory to point to the project directory.
This is problematic on many levels:
It's never wise to mix binary output directories and source trees
If the web application is buried deep within a directory hierarchy of other source, wherein many projects produce libraries which may be used as support libraries in the web application, then all the other supporting projects must have their binary output directories set to a bin directory a some non-obvious, nonsensical location somewhere in the source tree.
This "typical" VS setup does not have your web app setup duplicate the "production" setup you would get from a publish: there may be files in your source tree (an old .js file there there from a repository extraction, for example) that are not referenced in your projects, and so would not be in the production published package, but are there in your debugging setup.
It is very possible and very easy to configure all the projects in a Visual Studio solution to build to a bin directory in some subdirectory cleanly placed outside the source tree. It is also easy to ensure that the web app build places all content cleanly in this directory. It is also easy to configure an IIS virtual directory to point to this build output directory. And then Visual Studio, unannounced and unbidden, screws this up by arbitrarily changing the physical directory of the carefully configured virtual IIS app, to point to the middle of one's source tree.
How can this crazy-making behaviour be stopped? I.e. how do I prevent Visual Studio from automagically re-setting the physical path of the virtual web directory each time the web app project is opened?
This question has been asked many times here on Stack Overflow, but I have seen no real answers:
The response to this question (IIS8.5 is automatically changing Physical Path property) simply indicates how to control the order in which Visual Studio does its repointing.
This question and response (Visual Studio creating IIS virtual directories when solution opened) simply confirm the behaviour.
The response to this question (Opening projects changes iis settings) is simply wrong, as are some of the comments.
These questions (Visual Studio 2012 changes IIS application directory without asking), (Visual Studio changes local IIS configuration) have no responses.
Basically, no one has said it can't be done, but no one has give a decent solution either.
I have my application in IIS pointed at %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\web, and would like it to stay that way. Like others, I discovered that every time I opened the solution in Visual Studio (I'm using 2017), it would change the application's path in IIS to point to the path that Visual Studio uses.
I've made the following change to the project settings (web tab) for my project. In the servers section, I've set the drop-down to "External Host", and then entered the project URL as https://localhost/web. I'm now able to open the solution in VS without it updating the path in IIS.
So I have a handful of Visual Studio projects that I need to move to another computer. Is it as simple as a copy and paste or will that mess something up? Both machines will have the same version of Visual Studio installed, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Is there an export function that I've overlooked?
If the Visual Studio version is the same, you can just copy the project folder.
Till the time you are moving your solution file and associated files you should be good.
In case you are using any source control update your solution from there.
Hope you have the same VS version and any addon frameworks you have
You can directly copy the project to the projects folder. This worked perfectly for Visual C++ projects for me (and also some other projects). But when I copied my Cordova App from one PC to the other (Both had Visual Studio 2015), I wasn't able to open the project. Whenever I tried to open the project, trying both the ways - directly from the Project file and the open option in Visual Studio, it at first opened but when I tried to open a file, it just got hung and didn't respond.
This problem may occur because Cordova apps have some configuration files that might be different for different PCs. I am not sure that this is the reason for the problem.
A solution that I used was that I created a new Project and copied the files to the project folders (excluding the configuration files).
Can you save the file to cloud? if so then you could potentially upload the file to cloud and download the file to the new
In Visual Studio, if I try to copy a file from one project to another (by using Copy and Paste or by dragging the file to the new project while holding the Ctrl key) it creates a reference to the source file in the original location. Is there a way to create a physical copy of the source file and place that in the target project source direction without having to resort to using Windows Explorer to copy the file manually?
It's not pretty, but when I want to do what you're suggesting, I double-click on the file in Visual Studio, which opens it. Then I do a File->Save As, choose the right directory and save it. All from within Visual Studio. This is usually followed by adding the new file to the other project.
Was just doing this and realized I should mention a side-effect. Depending on your source control (in my case, TFS 2010), doing this from within Visual Studio may modify the location of the file in the project. For me, this means making sure that neither the file nor its project have any pending changes, doing the save as, then doing an undo of the change this causes in TFS 2010 (project change, file add and delete).
From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0fb6xxhb.aspx:
If you are working with solution items, Visual C++ projects, or other similar projects, you are always working with links in Solution Explorer. If you are working with Visual Basic projects, Visual C# projects, and other projects, you might be working with links or files.
Essentially, the answer to my question is 'No'. In most cases, I must use Windows Explorer.