my team uses Visual Studio for our development environment, we like it very much
we use the same project files in our automated build
our problem is that it's so easy to make changes in visual studios UX that get applied to the project files. we're seeing frequent build breaks
...I know...I know... dont submit them to the repro!
I wish I could convince everyone to be more careful, but lets be honest - it's very easy given the number of permutations {x86,x64,any} {release,debug}
My question: Is there anything I can add to a VS project that would make it more difficult to make changes? I'm not looking for a perfect solution, but the UX in VS works great up until a point, and then I'd prefer notepad to keep mistakes down
I could make the file read only, I dont know how that would play with our source control but I could investigate.
I'm hoping for something clever, maybe a mode that would prompt for confirmation before changing?
ideas / tips?
Bring a piggy bank to the office. If a user commits a file that breaks the automated build, then that person has to add $1 to the piggy bank. At the end of the project, or when the pot reaches a particular amount, buy something for the team and print up a sheet showing how much each person "contributed" to the pot.
You should check visual studio for options so that check out and check in are explicit.
You can also add check in policies, which among other can demand that a clean build was done locally before checking in.
If you would like more help, you should add some information both about your current setup and what you would like to prevent and what you would like achieve.
I usually have the team lead check-out the project file and keep it locked. Then nobody else can check-in changes. It is a little lo-tech, but it worked each time we did it. A benefit to this approach is that, when a user tries to make a change to the project file, he/she gets a reminder right away (because it can't be checked-out).
If we need changes, the project lead makes the changes, checks-in and out right away.
Related
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 working in VS 2010 and am connected to a Team Foundation Server.
In order to edit source files I have to check them out from the server. After I'm done with editing, I have to check them back in (to make changes visible to everyone else) or discard changes.
I am currently in the process of getting acquainted with the architecture and systems, so I'd like to add a lot of personal comments while I play around with everything.
However I'd prefer to not make these comments visible to everyone else. (And I dont want to delete them everytime I commit changes via check-in)
Is there a VS function I did not yet discover or a plugin that allows me to enter comments that dont get commited to the TFS? Maybe something like virtual post-its, just something that lets me attach stupid reminders on certain blocks of code?
(yes I know, proper documentation would make this obsolete but the system is as it is and its huge and I'm not the one to document this all, just want to get used to the code)
VS2010/TFS2010 no built in functionality that I know of, for TFS2012 you could possibly use code reviews.
Maybe the Visual studio extension StickyNotes is what you want.
I have a project that is source controlled using TFS. I was doing some coding on my laptop when, unfortunately, my computer crashed and I ended up having to re-install Windows. I was afraid that all my code would be lost, but thankfully I was able to restore the code files.
My problem is that now I need to commit the changes to TFS. Currently the projects do not have any source bindings. I can't overwrite the current code base because there is work that has been done since my crash by other devs.
How can I add the changes I've made to TFS?
The way i've done something like this is kinda hackish, but what i usually do is get latest from TFS onto my laptop, and checkout all of the code from the project in question. Then i take the changed code and copy it over that folder, check it in. TFS should be smart enough to only really affect the actual code items that have been changed. You can see in the history the actual files that got changed to be sure.
If you know the exact files that you need to update, then that will make things much easier, because you can do the above steps, but then just check out the particular files you know of. You can do a compare between them and your new code to make sure that you don't overwrite anything your other programmers have done. Again, hackish, but i don't know of any streamlined way to do this.
You might want to make sure that you download the TFS visual studio extension, since that will give you rollback capability.
I hope this qualifies as programming related since it involves how to structure a project.
Because I've always used the web site model with VS.net I never had solution and project files and putting everything into source control worked great. I knew that everything I had in my web site directory was all I needed for the web site.
Now I'm using asp.net MVC and it only has a project model so now I have these solution and project files. If I work on it alone it's fine but once other people start to add/delete files from the project our solution file gets messed up and people end up having to grab the latest solution file, see what got changed and then add back/remove their files and check in the solution file again. It's become sort of a problem because sometimes people don't realize the solution file was changed, they make other changes and then when they check in everything other people do an update on their files they find that their files are gone from the project (although still physically on disk).
Is this normal? Is there a way to structure a project so that we don't need to check in solution and project files?
Your developers are not using TFS correctly. You should have multiple check-outs turned on, and everyone needs to be careful to merge their changes correctly when checking in. TFS will prompt you to do this, and accepting the defaults is nearly always the right thing to do.
It's not uncommon to have one or two developers who never get it, and you might have to help them now and then. But every programmer who works on a team needs to learn how to use source control tools correctly. If they can't manage that, they shouldn't be writing software.
[edit] It occurs to me that you might run into these problems if you check in the *.sln file directly, rather than choosing to "Add Solution to Source Control".
I don't think it's normal - what are you using for source control? It sounds like developers aren't respecting changes that others a making - checking in without merging first.
I know that early on in a project, when lots of files are being added & deleted, it can be a problem to keep up - you need to check out the project file, add your files, then check in the new file & project so other developers can also update it. You'll probably have multiple project files in a solution - perhaps one interim solution would be to have one "holding" project for each developer, then clean them up periodically - though these types of temporary fixes do have a tendency to become permanent.
I don't know of a way to set up a project file that's not in source control, though I suppose you could create a script that would generate them.
Having been through this, the key is respect & good communication between the developers.
This tends to happen with TFS multiple check outs. It can be hard to grasp coming from VSS to TFS as VSS allowed one person to check a file out at one time. Auto-merge should work most of the time for you but a couple of rules should ease the pain:
Check in early and often (if you add remove or rename a file check it in straight away even if it is a blank holder)
Before you check in do a get latest, this will ask you to resolve conflicts locally
Try to get continuous integration set up so that developers always know the state of the buidl and whether it is OK to check in\out.
We had a bit fo pain at the start of our current project but it soon settled down when we followed the rules above.
Personally, I think making changes to project and solution files requires discipline and clear (well understood) rules throughout your development team. These files (.sln, .*proj) are the bottlenecks of your project, and any errors or inconsistencies can cost you in team downtime. Changes need to be well thought out, planned and then executed.
They must be secured by source control (which you're already using, excellent) and your team members should work on the basis of only making the changes they need, and not leaving project or solution files checked out for an extended period.
If you are allowing multiple (shared) checkouts, this could become problematic in terms of overwriting another user's changes. Depending on your source control mechanism, people may be required to manually merge changes. Personally, I'd ask people to negotiate their project/solution changes with each other over merging (this can't always be achieved).
A third option if you are using TFS is the shelve feature. If someone needs to make changes locally, they can shelve the changes and merge later.
Lastly, another strategy is to try to architect your solution to be as modularized as possible - so people are distributed, working on separate projects and do not (ideally) have to overlap on too many common areas.
I'm not sure if you are using TFS, as people have mentioned, but if you are (or if you are using source control with similar capabilities) you can set it such that sln and csproj files are exclusive lockouts and are not able to be merged.
We have done this with quite large teams and while it causes some initial issues as people get used to it in the long run it has resolved many issues that were previously causing problems. Essentially you trade longer term merge issues/complexity for short term compile/checkin issues which we have found to be a good trade off.
Once you have set it to forced exclusive checkout and no merge you then get your dev teams used to the fact they should keep locks on the sln and proj files for as shorter time as possible.
Always check them in.
Always check out latest (merge if possible), make sure your change is there, before checking in a new version.
If your source control doesn't require a special action to check in from an old version, GET A DIFFERENT SOURCE CONTROL.
I just wonder what the best approach is to have multiple users work on a Project in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
We got a Solution with multiple Class Libraries, but when everyone opens the solution, we keep getting the "X was modified, Reload/Discard?" prompt all the time. Just opening one project is an obvious alternative, but I find it harder to use as you can't just see some of the other classes in other projects that way.
Are there any Guidelines for Team Development with VS2005 Pro?
Edit: Thanks. The current environment is a bit limited in the sense there is only 1 PC with RDP Connection, but that will change in the future. Marking the first answer as Accepted, but they are all good :)
What you need is source control.
You should definitely not open the same files over the network on multiple machines. For one thing, Visual Studio has safeguards in place to prevent you from modifying certain files during a build, but it has none of that that will prevent others from modifying the same files over the network.
By setting up source control, each developer will have a separate copy of the files locally on his or her developer machine, and periodically communicate with the source control system to check in/commit changes. After that, other developers can ask for the latest updates when they're ready to retrieve them.
Use source control to keep a central repository of all your code. Then each user checks out their own copy of the source code and works locally. Then submits only the code that changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control
A number of people have recommended using source control and I totally agree. However you also need do the following.
Exclude your personal options files from the repository (eg your .suo files)
Exclude your App.config files from the repository. - Not entirely but you need to have a Template.App.config. You commit that instead, and only copy your App.config into the Template.App.config when you make structural changes. That was each user has their own individual config for testing.
There are probably some other files worth excluding (obj directories and so forth) but thats all I can think of right now.
Peter
This might sound snide, but if you're opening up the solution from a shared location then you're doing something wrong. If that's the case then you should start using source control (something like Subversion) and have everyone check out a copy of the project to work on.
However if you're already using source control, then it might be a symptom of having the wrong things checked in. I find that you only need the sln, and the vcproj under source control.
Otherwise I don't know...
You should definitely, definitely be working with source control!
This will help stop the collisions that are occurring. Also, if you are making changes to the shared projects this often that it is a problem, then also ensure that all code is tested before getting checked in (otherwise they may bust someone else's build), but make sure they check in often (or time gained from not dealing with prompts will be lost in merging conflicts) :)