I have a laptop and a desktop computer that I wish to share visual studio projects between - what is the simplest way to do this?
The simplest way to do this at the moment is to use Microsoft's new and free TFS (Team Foundation Server) service "in the cloud".
First, sign up a TFS account here. You will have to choose a name, which will give you a URL like http://yourname.visualstudio.com/
Next, within Visual Studio you can add a TFS server, where you will be able to check-in and check-out your solutions and projects from any number of computers.
Do you want to share Visual Studio project (1) or do you want to put the project under version-control (2)?
For the first case you may consider online backup / storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive. You will be able to access your project from different computers and could share it with others when needed. It's really the simplest way; no version-control though.
If you require version-control I advise you to choose Apache Subversion. TFS is like walking the hard and thorny path and is definitely NOT the simplest way.
So, you can install VisualSVN to add SVN as a source control to Visual Studio. Then you can "Add the solution to Subversion" with VisualSVN.
You can either host repositories on your LAN with VisualSVN Server (or any other SVN server) or use a hosted SVN service. Initial setup takes a couple of minutes max actually.
You can use a free SVN service. Here is one provided:- https://www.assembla.com/home
Related
I have a Visual Studio project that I want to work on in two computers.
I'm looking for how to sync the project between the computers.
I have a few options, and I'm open to other suggestions:
Dropbox
OneDrive, which is integrated nicely in Windows 10.
Github, although I'm not sure if it is used for this purpose, and don't want my code to be public.
What has worked for you?
Thanks!
If you use Visual Studio, then Visual Studio Team Services is good for you.
For source control you can use TFVC or Git and it's free (for team up to 5 people) and repositories are private.
GitHub is a nice choice, not only to share between machines, but mainly as version control.
Also, if your version of Visual Studio supports it, you could use TFS - the versioning integrated to it.
OneDrive or Dropbox doesn't have version control - once your project grows, you will notice it is really needed.
For source control I would prefer tortoise svn (over git and bitbucket) - because it's easier to use.
For data replication / sync - google drive. Its similar to microsoft one drive, but bit faster.
Oh common - downvoters ! :-) I know you're absolutely love git, but unfortunately it's too over abstract, lacks of proper error handling, to difficult to use.
We can skype if you think otherwise, and I can prove it to you.
I work from a small IT department and I'm pushing to move from our current TFS implementation to Visual Studio Online. My boss who gets the final say is hesitant because "What if Microsoft decides to stop offering the service, without notice, or their servers fail how will we get our code". While I find such a scenario unlikely and the scenario of our TFS server crashing and burning with no backups/bad backups much more likely. I still need to address his concern.
Does anyone know of a way to "backup" a remote TFS implementation? So far the only thing I've come up with is doing a nightly pull of Visual Studio Online and submitting it to a local repo, feels hacky, feels wrong.
Take a look over at the discussion on this StackOverflow question: Is There A Way To Backup Visual Studio Team Services Projects?
Here is Richard's answer:
There's no out of the box backup ability.
Now, if you are only referring to source control, and not work items,
pull requests, builds, test plans or anything else that the service
offers, then I'd suggest you migrate your code over to git.
With git every developer will have a complete copy of the source
repository, including all history and commit comments. From there,
it's a simple task to push the git repository to a different git
hoster (such as bitbucket or github) and make them your new centrally
hosted git repository.
On a historical note, Visual Studio Online at one point offered a data
export for a period of time. You might want to add a vote or three to
this related UserVoice idea to help raise the importance of the
feature with Microsoft.
Side comment: The business risks in using Visual Studio Online will
come from either Microsoft shutting down the Visual Studio Online
service or that the underlying Azure infrastructure has such a
catastrophic failure that your Visual Studio Online account is
unrecoverable. Both of those are extremely low risk, and very likely
lower than the risks you'd have running TFS on-premises, in your own
data centre, unless of course, your infrastructure and staff are
better than Microsoft's :-)
I agree with Richard. Visual Studio Online is not going anywhere :) You can also use tools like OpsHub, TaskTop, and Kovair to setup a two-way synchronization or use the TFS Integration Platform to do the same thing if you really wanted an option. If you are using Git repositories, you can clone the repository into other locations to maintain multiple copies. All of those options take effort.
I posted the same answer to this stackoverflow question.
We developed our own VSO backup tool. We scheduled it as a scheduled task and it runs once a night. It then
just clones all our repositories to disk.
Taken from this blog:
We use the VSO Rest API to query our VSO account and get all the data
we need. Since in VSO you can only have one Team Project Collection,
we retrieve all the team projects of the default collection. Each of
these team projects can have multiple repositories that need to be
backed up. A folder is created for each team project and saved to a
location on disk that can be configured in the app.config. When the
team project folder is created, the task loops over each repository in
the team project and creates folders for each repository.
You can also fork it on GitHub here
I have a team of 3 developers and I want that we should be able to work on the project from our own homes, at any time (or at the same time) and make changes to the project. Till now, we have to mail each other all the updates versions to keep in sync. We are developing the project in Visual Studio 2010 currently and use SQL Express 2008. I searched internet and got some idea about Team Foundation Server but it requires Windows Server. I don't want to get into this mess and I have a Win7 Pc. Please suggest me some easy solutions.
There are any number of low-cost (often free to open source projects) hosted source control providers out there.
Personally I use Subversion along with the AnkhSVN plugin for Visual Studio.
Mercurial and Git are also quite popular and supported within Visual Studio via plugins.
Any of those options can be setup in a few minutes (if you use a hosted solution) and will all work for a small team.
Version Control is what your looking for,and your right there are some complicated solutions out there. TortoiseSVN isn't too complicated but works well.
Can I have some basic project management in Visual Studion without TFS or is TFS what I need?
Basically I like to get a list with my projects, last edited dates, and if possible project tags (customer for example), and when selecting one VS should load it. From the right repository (Mercurial/Git/Svn). I can move my project to some repo host if they have this solution (Addon).
At the moment I handle the projecs manually with Windows standard folders + SVN/Hg in folder context menu, and thats a headache.
Thank you
As far as I know Visual Studio doesn't support that functionality natively.
TFS isn't my forte but I know it comes with MSDN subscriptions and the retail version is around $500 if that is the path you are interested in. If you do go the TFS route you have an option to use TFS Basic during install which is a greatly simplified install of TFS that can even use SQL Express.
You can check out pricing and download the trial from here if you want more info:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/team-foundation-server
I want to set up source control for my project, but it seems like I need a server for this. I've never done this before, and I couldn't find anything helpfull yet.
Is there any way to host a server locally so Visual studio can use it? Or do you know any online (free) servers I can use?
By the way, if source control is not actually what i should use for keeping track of changes in my files, please suggest a better option.
Thanks in advance.
There's a lot of solutions to this problem.
A simple way to go is use subversion.... get tortiseSVN, and you can make a local repository ( you don't need to run any kind of server software ).
Then get something like Ankh SVN for Visual Studio
All free software!
You need to pick a source control provider, such as Team Foundation Server, Perforce, or GIT.
You can then install a server on your machine, install a Visual Studio plugin (not applicable for TFS), and connect to the server.
If you have your VS2010 licence through a MSDN subscription, then you have a licence to TFS, see: http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2009/11/02/License-costs-of-Team-Foundation-Server-2010.aspx