For one of our company's products we need to generate iOS apps with slight changes (different logos, slightly different settings in the Info.plist, etc.); but basically they are all based on the same source code.
Now that we are starting to get some traction, it becomes slightly annoying to have like 20-30 different schemes and targets in the main Xcode project - plus it's a pain to have colleagues modify it, because it tends to break things now and then.
Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with Xcode's inner guts; but I'm pretty sure someone else already has solved this before.
Some ideas that came to my mind:
Have a separate Xcode project and...
... import the "base code" using a Framework/Library.
... add the "base code" as a project (Dependencies?)
Not sure what the best practice is here; ideally there would be a clear separation of the project code and configuration of customer app targets. More ideally this would be a maintainable by co-workers without the risk of breaking the base code accidently.
Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions?
It depends on the use case. Do you need to release (Archive) the targets for a synchronized deployment? Or are these client customizations that get released independently? How big is the development team?
There are really only a few options either way.
Option 1
Manage the products as separate targets. This is basically what you are doing now. You can set it up so that building one target builds them all to save yourself some agony. The major drawback here is that you are managing images/plist data separately.
This is the way I usually handle it. The customizations are usually one off and you can specify a different precompiled header to alter some functional differences.
Option 2
Manage the products as separate branches in CVS. This can be a bit of a headache to handle but works better if there is a larger team working in the codebase. Keep the functional code on one branch. Maintain an independent branch for each product. Merge changes from the functional branch into the product branches as needed.
Option 3
Mange the products as separate sub-projects. This is very similar to option 1 as you still need to maintain the settings separately but the advantage is that you are less likely to mess up other products when making changes to the underlying xml for the project files.
Factors to consider is the size of your development team as well as the existing workflow of the team.
Related
We need to fork our 18 project, 1,000+ file VS2015 C# solution so we can build a similar but different product. Both products will continue to be actively developed.
Changes might be product-specific (of course, otherwise we'd only need one product) or product-agnostic (e.g. payment processing).
I'd like improvements made in either product to be available to - but not automatically part of the other.
I know this could be achieved by manually selecting and merging changesets into the other product, but is there a better way? For example, is there a way developers can mark their check-ins as applicable to both products? Are there any tools I can use to help with this?
Even though Forking and Branching isn't the same! Branching means making a new copy for a new feature and experiments which will be merged to the master later. Forking means making a copy for an independent project.
However, in TFS the branching (from VS or command) is really the only implementation of fork. Detail steps please refer the official MSDN link: Branch folders and files
Note: You can only branch the source Code, not a Project (Work Items, Queries, Reports) though. Those must be copied into the new one.
I am looking for some advice on how to allow easy customisation and extension of a core product on a per client basis. I know it is probably too big a question. However we really need to get some ideas as if we get the setup of this wrong it could cause us problems for years. I don't have a lot of experience in customising and extending existing products.
We have a core product that we usually bespoke on a per client basis. We have recently rewritten the the product in C# 4 with an MVC3 frontend. We have refactored and now have 3 projects that compose the solution:
Core domain project (namespace - projectname.domain.*) - consisting of domain models (for use by EF), domain service interfaces etc (repository interfaces)
Domain infrastructure project (namespace -projectname.infrastructure.*) - that implements the domain service-EF Context, Repository implementation, File upload/download interface implementations etc.
MVC3 (namespace - projectname.web.*)-project that consists of controllers, viewmodels, CSS, content,scripts etc. It also has IOC (Ninject) handling DI for the project.
This solution works fine as a standalone product. Our problem is extending and customising the product on a per client basis. Our clients usually want the core product version given to them very quickly (usually within a couple of days of signing a contract) with branded CSS and styling. However 70% of the clients then want customisations to change the way it functions. Some customisations are small such as additional properties on domain model, viewmodel and view etc. Others are more significant and require entirely new domain models and controllers etc.
Some customisations appear to be useful to all clients, so periodically we would like to change them from being customisations and add them to the core.
We are presently storing the source code in TFS. To start a project we usually manually copy the source into a new Team Project. Change the namespace to reflect the clients name and start customising the basic parts and then deploy to Azure. This obviously results in an entirely duplicated code base and I’m sure isn’t the right way to go about it. I think we probably should be having something that provides the core features and extends/overrides where required. However I am really not sure how to go about this.
So I am looking for any advice on the best project configuration that would allow:
Rapid deployment of the code – so easy to start off a new client to
allow for branding/minor changes
Prevent the need for copying and pasting of code
Use of as much DI as possible to keep it loosely coupled
Allow for bespoking of the code on a
per client basis
The ability to extend the core product in a single
place and have all clients gain that functionality if we get the
latest version of the core and re-deploy
Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Happy to add more information that anyone thinks will help.
I may not answer to this completly, but here some advices:
Don't copy your code, ever, whatever the reason is.
Don't rename the namespace to identify a given client version. Use the branches and continuous integration for that.
Choose a branching model like the following: a root branch called "Main", then create one branch from Main per major version of your product, then one branch per client. When you develop something, target from the start in which branch you'll develop depending on what you're doing (a client specific feature will go in the client branch, a global version in the version branch or client branch if you want to prototype it at first, etc.)
Try the best to rely on Work Item to track features you develop to know in which branch it's implemented to ease merge across branches.
Targeting the right branch for you dev is the most crucial thing, you don't have to necessary define some hard rules of "what to do in which occasion", but try to be consistant.
I've worked on a big 10 years project with more than 75 versions and what we usually did was:
Next major version: create a new branch from Main, dev Inside
Next minor version: dev in the current major branch, use Labels to mark each minor versions Inside your branch.
Some complex functionnal features was developped in the branch of the client that asked for it, then reversed integrated in the version branch when we succeeded in "unbranded" it.
Bug fixes in client branch, then reported in other branches when needed. (you have to use the Work Item for that or you'll get easily lost).
It's my take on that, other may have different point of view, I relied a lot on the Work Item for traceability of the code, which helped a lot for the delivery and reporting of code.
EDIT
Ok, I add some thought/feedback about branches:
In Software Configuration Management (SCM) you have two features to help you for versionning: branches and labels. Each one is not better nor worst than the other, it depends on what you need:
A Label is used to mark a point in time, using a label, for you to later be able to go back to that point if needed.
A Branch is used to "duplicate" your code to be able to work on two versions at the same time.
So using branches only depends on what you want to be able to do. If you have to work one many different versions (say one per client) at the same time: there's no other way to deal with it than using branches.
To limit the number of branches you have to decide what will be a new branch or what will be marked by a label for: Client Specific Versions, Major Version, Minor Version, Service Pack, etc.
Using branches for Client versions looks to be a no brainer.
Using one branch for each Major version may be the toughest choice for you to make. If you choose to use only one branch for all major versions, then you won't have the flexibility to work on different major versions at the same time, but your number of branches will be the lowest possible.
Finally, Jemery Thompson has a good point when he says that not all your code should be client dependent, there are some libraries (typically the lowest level ones) that shouldn't be customized per client. What we do usually is using a separated branch tree (which is not per client) for Framework, cross-cutting, low level services libraries. Then reference these projects in the per client version projects.
My advice for you is using Nuget for these libraries and create nuget package for them, as it's the best way to define versionned dependencies. Defining a Nuget package is really easy, as well as setting up a local Nuget server.
I just worried that with 30 or 40 versions (most of which aren't that different) branching was adding complexity.
+1 Great question, its more of a business decision you'll have to make:
Do I want a neat code-base where maintenance is easy and features and fixes get rolled out quickly to all our customers
or do I want a plethora of instances of one codebase split up, each with tiny tweaks that is hard (EDIT: unless your a ALM MVP who can "unbrand" things) to merged into a trunk.
I agree with almost everthing #Nockawa mentioned except IMHO dont substitute extending your code architecture with branches.
Definitely use a branch/trunk strategy but as you mentioned too many branches makes it harder to quickly roll-out site wide features and hinder project-wide continuous integration. If you wish to prevent copy/pasting limit the number of branches.
In terms of a coding solution here is what I believe you are looking for:
Modules/Plug-ins, Interfaces and DI is right on target!
Deriving custom classes off base ones (extending the DSL per customer, Assembly.Load())
Custom reporting solution (instead of new pages a lot of custom requests could be reports)
Pages with spreadsheets (hehe I know - but funnily enough it works!)
Great examples of the module/plugin point are CMS's such as DotNetNuke or Kentico. Other idea's could be gained by looking at Facebook's add-in architecture, plugin's for audio and video editing, 3D modeling apps (like 3DMax) and games that let you build your own levels.
The ideal solution would be a admin app that you can choose your
modules (DLL's), tailor the CSS (skin), script the dB, and auto-deploy
the solution upto Azure. To acheive this goal plugin's would make so
much more sense, the codebase wont be split up. Also when an
enhancement is done to a module - you can roll it out to all your
clients.
You could easily do small customisations such as additional properties on domain model, viewmodel and view etc with user controls, derived classes and function overrides.
Do it really generically, say a customer says I want to a label that tally's everyone's age in the system, make a function called int SumOfField(string dBFieldName, string whereClause) and then for that customers site have a label that binds to the function. Then say another customer wants a function to count the number of product purchases by customer, you can re-use it: SumOfField("product.itemCount","CustomerID=1").
More significant changes that require entirely new domain models and controllers etc would fit the plug-in architecture. An example might be a customer needs a second address field, you would tweak your current Address user-control to be a plug-in to any page, it would have settings to know which dB table and fields it can implement its interface to CRUD operations.
If the functionality is customised per client in 30-40 branches
maintainability will become so hard as I get the feeling you wont be
able to merge them together (easily). If there is a chance this will
get really big you dont want to manage 275 branches. However, if its
that specialised you have to go down to the User-Control level for
each client and "users cant design their own pages" then having
Nockawa 's branching strategy for the front-end is perfectly
reasonable.
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/
I'm making the switch from a centralized SCM system to GIT. OK, I'll admit which one, it is Visual SourceSafe. So in addition to getting over the learning curve of Git commands and workflow, the biggest issue I'm currently facing is how to migrate our current repository over to Git in regards to single or some flavor of multiple repositories.
I've seen this question asked in a variety of ways, but normally just the basic..."I have applications that want to share some lower level libraries" and the canned response is always "use separate repositories" and/or "use Git submodules" without much explanation of when/why this pattern should be used (what does it overcome, what does it eliminate?) From my limited knowledge/reading on Git so far, it appears that submodules may have their own demons to battle, especially for someone new to Git.
However, what I've yet to see someone blatantly ask is, "When you have the traditional n-tier development (UI, Business, Data, and then Shared Tools) where each layer is its own project, should you use one or multiple repositories?" It is not clear to me because almost always, when a new 'feature' is added, code changes ripple through each layer.
To complicate matters with respect to Git, we've duplicated these layers across 'frameworks' to make more manageable projects/components from a developer's perspective. For the purpose of this discussion, lets call these collection of projects/layers 'Tahiti', which represents an entire 'product'.
The final 'layer' in our set up is the addition of client websites/projects which customize/expand upon Tahiti. Representing this in a folder structure might best look like:
/Clients
/Client1
/Client2
/UI Layer
/CoreWebsite (views/models/etc)
/WebsiteHelper (contains 'web' helpers appropriate for any website)
/Tahiti.WebsiteHelpers (contains 'web' helpers only appropriate for Tahiti sites)
/BusinessLayer (logic projects for different 'frameworks')
/Framework1.Business
/Framework2.Business
/DataLayer
/Framework1.Data
/Framework2.Data
/Core (projects that are shared tools useable by any project/layer)
/SharedLib1
/SharedLib2
After explaining how we've expanded on the traditional n-tier design with multiple projects, I'm looking for any experience on what decision you've made with a similar situation (even the simple UI, Business, Data separation was all that you used) and what was easier/harder because of your decision. Am I right in my preliminary reading on how submodules can be a bit of pain? More pain than is worth the benefit?
My gut reaction is to one repository for Tahiti (all projects excluding the 'client projects'), then one repository for each client. The entire Tahiti source I'm guessing has to be <10k files. Here is my reasoning (and I welcome criticism)
It seems to me, that in Git you want to track history of 'features' vs individual 'projects/files', and even with our project separation, a 'feature' will always span multiple projects.
A 'feature' coded in the core site will almost always minimally effect the core website and all projects for a 'framework' (i.e. CoreWebsite, Framework1.Business, Framework1.Data)
A feature can easily span multiple frameworks (I'd say 10% of the features we implement would span frameworks - CoreWebsite, Framework1.Business, Framework1.Data, Framework2.Business, Framework2.Data)
In a similar fashion, a feature could require changes to 1 or more SharedLib projects and/or the 'UI website helper' projects.
Changes to client's custom code will almost always only be local to their repository and not require tracking changes to other components to see what the 'entire feature change set' was.
Given that a feature spans projects to see the entire scope, if each project was its own repository, it seems it would be a pain to try to analyze *all* code changes across repositories?
Thanks in advance.
The reason most people advise to do separate repositories is because it separates out changes and change sets. If someone makes a change to the client projects (which you say doesn't really effect others), there is no reason for someone to update the entire code base. They can simply just get the changes from the project(s) they care about.
Git Submodules are like Externals in Subversion. You can set up your git repositories so that each one is a separate layer, and then use submodules to include the projects that are needed in the various hierarchies you have.
So if for example:
/Core -- It's own git repository that contains it's base files (as you had outlined)
/SharedLib1
/SharedLib2
/UI Layer -- Own git repository
/CoreWebsite
/WebsiteHelper
/Tahiti.WebsiteHelpers
/Core -- Git Submodule to the /Core repository
/SharedLib1
/SharedLib2
This ensures that any updates to the /Core repository are brought into UI Layer repository. It also means that if you have to update your shared libraries you don't have to do it across 5-6 projects.
VS 2022 support multi-repo.
The easiest way to enable multi-repo support is to use CTRL+Q, type
“preview” and open the preview features pane. Scroll to “Enable
multi-repo support” and toggle the checkbox. This functionality is
still a preview feature, which means we are working hard to add more
support in the coming releases. In the meantime, we’re depending on
your feedback, the community, to build what you need.
See Screenshot:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/multi-repo-support-in-visual-studio/
There is a similar question at Best practice for managing project variants in Git? but the context is different and I suspect the answer might be too.
I have a Cocoa product "First" managed with Xcode and versioned using git. "First" is still evolving, and is currently at its third version.
Then a customer comes and ask for a variant of First, called Second. The changes from First to Second affect many, but not all, files. The changes affect source code but also resources (graphics elements, nib files, property lists...).
Now the two products are alive and share a number of common files. However, some changes such as bug fixes might apply to both products. Possibly, a new feature might be added to both products.
What would be the best way to manage such a scenario:
with Xcode
with git
I have two ideas, which are mutually exclusive:
Idea 1: git branch "First" into "Second", and apply any applicable change from one project back to the other one. This leads to two totally separate Xcode directories and projects.
Idea 2: Add a target named "Second" to the Xcode project. Now the same Xcode project has two targets and is used to develop and build both products. But this makes it difficult to manage releases for First and Second in git (releases have no reason to be synchronized).
Idea 2 makes the parallel development process very easy. Code is always in sync. Divergences can be handled through compile-time variables and a single source file OR through different source files. It makes version management more obscure though.
Idea 1 is perhaps cleaner, but then, what's the best practice to manage whatever stays common between the two projects? Can you do a "partial merge" between two git branches? On what basis? Or must that be handled manually?
It might be possible to encapsulate and extract some common part into a module or library, but not always. For example I don't think that's possible for the common document icons. Also refactoring "First" so that all common items are extracted away in a build-able manner is a major undertaking that I'd rather do a bit at a time.
I realize there may not be a perfect solution. I am looking for ideas and suggestion.
As a relatively recent git adopter I also realize that this may be an RTFM question. Then simply point me to the FM to R.
My preference is idea2. I currently do this as a way of writing a plug-in for the Main App, and then client apps that go on all the nodes of a cluster. The Plug-in and clients share 90% of the same code, so this makes it super-easy to maintain and debug the where/how of what's going on.