We have an online shop/e-commerce website we developed in ASP.NET webforms with Visual Studio 2010 which we use as a template for building more shops. Each of our clients has slightly different requirements, and so we need to make customisations to the template, such as adding a field to a product, or adding new database tables relating to products.
We want to be able to make improvements to the template and propagate the changes to the customised websites built on it, whilst maintaining those customisations.
So far I have a couple of ideas:
Do a 'diff' on each customised website from the template and store as a patch for each site. When updating the template, just copy the template over all the customised sites and re-apply the patches. However, I'm not sure how we would handle version control, as each site is currently stored as a separate project in Visual SourceSafe.
Try to build the template in such a way as to allow customisations WITHOUT changes to the code or database. But I feel this would be quite difficult to achieve.
Does anyone have any better ideas, or suggestions on practical implementations?
Related
It's unclear how the repositories are connected and tied together. Each git repo has a different package of cs files, with their own unique features and design schemas. Rather than a hierarchical design structure, where in my understanding or example:
Abp-base (free git repo), would have core essentials
AbpZero-paid (membership subscription to premium git repo), would add additional features into their design that would encourage others to pay for.
AbpZeroTemplate-demo (download from website, not git), would be a sample utilizing the paid content to push and drive sales to unlock the tool to it's full potential.
I downloaded and even paid for the different tiers, but all of the contents are all over the place. When I tried to combine them so that I could take advantage of a complete product, nothing lined up properly, and I get breakage everywhere.
How am I supposed to change the crucial schema design flaws when half of the .proj links to .dll that expect the class to be structured a certain way?
Example:
User is structured: "Name", "Surname". But i want it to be "Firstname", "Lastname." Some may ask, what's the difference? Just like how "Maiden name" is different from "Last name" or "Family name." Those little nuances are'nt procedural thinking. If you went to a stranger and asked "what's your name?" and they said "Chuck Jones," you would then ask to clarify, "What's your first name?"
Each git repository is running off of a different versioning number, that doesn't match with their counterpart. AbpZero is on a stable release version 5.x, and you go to GitHub for Abp and it's saying version 3.x is stable and green. And one of them is using User<TTenant,TUser> as a class, and the other is using User<TUser>. So not only am I getting mixed signals on how they're supposed to work (because git repos point to each other, and rely on .dll for continuity) but they're also not even sharing the same coding structure.
Can anybody help me merge the old and new together, or tell me the direction on how the design is being built?
Disclaimer: I'm a contributor to ASP.NET Boilerplate
ASP.NET Core is a web framework developed by Microsoft, as you know. There are plenty different applications based on it.
ABP is an application framework on top of ASP.NET Core (and MVC 5.x but it's a different story - I skip). It tries to help real life applications on top of ASP.NET Core. It has many features like advanced authorization, background jobs, javascript proxies, DDD infrastructure and so on.. This is completely free and developed on Github: https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/aspnetboilerplate Thousands of developers are actively using it to build their applications.
ABP framework does not provide a User Interface itself, but provides the infrastructure. So, you should create an empty ASP.NET Core application, add nuget packages, configure the framework and modules, create a UI layout and some basic pages to start your development. This is also a time consuming work. That's why we have created "STARTUP TEMPLATES". There are two startup template:
(A) A free & open source startup template can be downloaded here: https://aspnetboilerplate.com/Templates (It just gets the code from https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/module-zero-core-template and renames solution for you). This is a simple startup template (but more powerful then ASP.NET Core's standard template when you make File > New Project).
(B) A PAID startup template, which becomes the product on https://aspnetzero.com/. This template has much much more features on top of the framework. You can see all on its web site. Since it's a paid product, the Github repository is private and only available to paid customers.
You either start with template (A) or template (B). You CAN NOT combine them. I believe it's very obvious. For instance. Microsoft provides different startup templates for ASP.NET Core: One of them is Angular, one of them is Razor Pages, one of them is empty... and so on.. So, you select one of them based on your needs.
Both of (A) and (B) templates work on the ABP framework and adds via nuget packages (it's already combined/integrated).
So, after this explanation, I believe no one would even think how to combine them.
How am i supposed to change the crucial schema design flaws when half of the .proj links to .dll that expect the class to be structured a certain way?
When you use a framework or a pre-build solution, you have significant advantages. However, there is nothing in the World that has only advantages. Every solution/framework/library will come with its own limitations, you like or not.
With that in mind.. Despite of other vendors, we provide the FULL SOURCE CODE! User class or another schema class is not inside a CLOSED/SECRET DLL. They are on nuget packages and are open source as I described before. They are framework code. If you want to change the framework code it's always possible. Just download the ABP framework on Github repository, include into your solution, remove nuget packages and add project references. Then you can freely change the User class. Source code is open & here:
https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/aspnetboilerplate/blob/dev/src/Abp.ZeroCore/Authorization/Users/AbpUser.cs
https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/aspnetboilerplate/blob/dev/src/Abp.Zero.Common/Authorization/Users/AbpUserBase.cs
Each git repository is running off of a different versioning number
Why we follow the same version numbers for different products those are released and developed separately? Does Microsoft have same version number for all products?
I wish i had enough money as the next guy to afford throwing around $1600 a year just to resolve issues with poorly documented code, but sadly i do not
There are thousands of customers paid it and they are happy about our product and they are renewing their licenses to be able to access to latest source code after 1 year. If anybody wants a refund, we always provide a money back without any question. Refund request ratio is smaller than 0.5% because developers love our framework and product.
My membership expired while i was resolving conflict issues with the code, and i immediately lost the ability to use git repo connected to that service
You can contact info#aspnetzero.com and request the latest version of the code (when the time your license expired). We always help to our customers about that. It would be better if you had contact with us.
I have a few (3) core projects I want to share across many solutions (12+).
So, say I have 12 websites and they use some shared back end core code (in this case I'm not talking about shared js, css or views - I'm talking about business objects, entity stuff, etc.).
I need to be able to identify which site has which version of the shared code in dev, test, prod, etc. so a developer can get the website code and get the right version of the shared code to develop or patch the website.
And then the MS build server needs to know which version of the shared code to get for the deployment.
To solve this, I'm seeing people branch that core code - which seems absurd to do 12+ times. (I do expect to branch the core code sometimes for things like hot fixes and long running projects.)
I'm also seeing people copy DLLs of the core code and check those in.
I would think I would list the dependencies for my solutions based on TFS label names somewhere so developers can easily get the apps running with the right code and given a tfs label the build server can get the code for the website and the proper version of the core code. I'm using TFS & VS 2013 at the moment too, so there's that.
So, is there a way to do this that's straightforward, supportable/scale-able and intuitive? Thanks - Peter
Labels in TFS is very limited. For example once the label created you couldn't change and update it. If one of your core projects updated, did you need to create a new label for it. If you did and use the new label for one of your solution. However you found there are some bugs in this update, you need a newer update of your core project to fix the bug. Then a newer label created, you need to manually maintain the dependencies which seems not to be an easy job.
Moreover how to list the dependencies for your solutions based on TFS label names? TFS don't have this built-in option, seems the only way is store it in a txt or someother files and check in the source control. Every time the developer open a website application need to check it first and get label from server to their workspace and work on it.
Usually the purpose of sharing code between projects is reducing maintenance. There’s two main code sharing paths: source and binary. The difference between them you could take a look at this blog: Code Sharing in Team Foundation Server
Sharing code between products is a primary cause of quality erosion and elevated bug counts. I would recommend you to build separately and sharing binary output through NuGet which use preferable.
Also take a look below similar questions:
Sharing code between solutions in TFS
TFS 2010 Branch Across Team Projects - Best Practices
We have 5 environments - Development, UAT, Staging, Live and DR.
Having more than 100 content editors, makes the Live Sitecore database content grow faster.
So almost every fortnight the content tree is out of sync with Development and UAT environment. When we try to develop new things, it is out dated content and sometimes new functionality breaks the live environment.
Please can anyone suggest an ideal way of keeping all the Sitecore databases in sync apart from creating packages and updating regularly so that we can follow a proper CI?
RAZL is not a solution that you should rely on for Continuous Integration, it's merely a database comparison tool.
Setting up proper CI for Sitecore is exactly what I'm doing for my current project and this is what we came up with:
TDS:
If you are willing to spend money, then take a look at TDS (Team Development for Sitecore).
It integrates with Visual Studio and provides you with tools for serialization of Sitecore items which you can then store in your source control.
A build server would then be able to pick up any changes in those serialized files and deploy them to your Test, Staging and even Production environment.
Alternative:
A free alternative to this is to use a combination of three open source modules:
Unicorn (for automatic serialization of your changes to Sitecore
items)
Courier (for package generation based on serialized items)
Sitecore Ship (for automated deployment of Sitecore packages)
I'm working with the free alternative myself at the moment and it works great.
Have you come across RAZL, it is a Sitecore Database Comparison Tool.
This is what they say about Razl:
Razl allows developers to have a complete side by side comparison between two Sitecore databases; highlighting features that are missing or not up to date. Razl allows you to find that one missing template, move it to the correct database.
It is quite incorrect to call Razl 'merely a database comparison tool' - from the first release, you could copy subtrees from one Sitecore database to another.
The initial drawback was that it could not be automated, but with Razl 3.0 (I think it started with Razl 2.4), Razl scripting was added, so you can easily automate Sitecore database syncing between environments.
To see how others use it, see Sean Holmesby's comments:
https://community.sitecore.net/developers/f/8/t/1767
and Nikola Gotsev's comments:
https://sitecorecorner.com/2014/10/27/the-amazing-world-of-razl-part-1/
It is very inexpensive, and with v3.0, it is much more powerful than the initial release, which required manual manipulation via the GUI interface.
We started programming in a project that uses Agile Work Item Templates. Now, there is some history of the code that we want to keep.
Also, we want to change to a customized CMMI template, so it is close to CMMI, but customized, with slightly different work items, also some new/removed ones (for testing purposes, we set it up in a different project).
How can we now merge the source (and history) from the one project with the work items from another project?
From my understanding, you could simply export/import the work item types, but then, all the reports and queries as well as the dashboard would not get updated properly as well? So all scenarios we can come up with now result in a loss of version history (simply importing the current state of the source into newly created project using CMMI and then updating the work items).
Is there a better solution?
(using TFS 2010 and VS 2010)
edit: some useful information to be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2011/05/17/tfs-integration-tools-where-does-one-start-part-3-dust-has-settled-did-it-work.aspx - like me, you will probably especially run into trouble with the ProcessBuildTemplates
Have you considered using the TFS Integration Tools? I'm not sure about the successful migration of work items for Team Projects using different templates, but I've been able to successfully migrate code with its history between Team Projects.
We have Team Foundation Server 2008 deployed as our source control management system. A team that is responsible for multiple products is asking for all their products to be put under a single TFS project. Their reason is because the products are all in a similar domain.
Here are my reasons against:
The workspace mappings will get weird, since projects will be mapped to subfolders
Continuous Integration may be a problem, since a single project can't be referenced
Tracking history of source control activity could be problematic
This just feels like an overall bad idea, but I would like some concrete reasons against it. If I'm completely off-base and this is a good approach to take, I'd like to hear that as well.
What are the pros/cons?
I have experience storing multiple Visual Studio Solutions (seperate products) under one TFS Team Project in both TFS2008 and TFS2010. Here is my take.
In both versions we create a folder for the Product, then a folder for the branches (Main, etc.) This makes it easy to see what product we are working on, and we can see the history of the product seperate from other products. Continuous integration works just fine with multiple build definitions, one for each product. We only create one workspace mapping for the entire TFS Team Project.
The shortfall in TFS2008 is that it can be difficult to manage work items for each Product. In TFS2008 the work items apply to the entire Team Project and it is not as easy as it should be to figure out which work item belongs to which product.
In TFS2010 the work items have an Areas and Iterations section. We use the Area to define the Product. So each Work Item gets an Area that matches the Product name. This has worked very well for us.
If you are not using work items heavily in TFS2008 than I don't think you should avoid putting multiple Products in one TFS Team Project, certinally not for the reasons you listed above.
Using one Team Project does haves some advantages:
1. There is ony one Team Project to manage and there is only one Share Point site.
2. You can see history across the entire Team Project easily.
My thoughts:
If there are assemblies shared amongst the projects, it makes sense to lump them together, otherwise you will run into the same problems that many people have discussed here, on how to handle shared assemblies.
You shouldn't encounter any problems with workspace mappings. Within our organization, we simply map $/ to a folder and go from there. Otherwise you could very easily map individual source control folders to different areas on disk. The only recommendation I would have is to put that mapping in a batch file, so that new members can run the batch and be consistent.
The only thing that you might lose out on a bit by lumping these all together is quick and easy reporting. If everything is in its own Team Project, the built-in reporting works "out of the box." If you put things together, you'll need to set up additional areas and iterations in order to do the reporting and tracking.
In our organization we have upward of 15 separate team projects, but every single one of them has more than one "product" underneath. We've been running this way for two years and really haven't had any problem with it, with the exception of the reporting.
Using a single Team Project for more than one software is a perfectly acceptable solution if you don't use separate templates for them. Martin Hinshelwood has a detailed blog post on the subject.
http://blog.hinshelwood.com/when-should-i-use-areas-in-tfs-instead-of-team-projects-in-team-foundation-server-2010/