I am a computer science student and my project partner and I are working on a project where we are required to develop a DB (JDBC) for our software. We are capable of doing this, but have hit a brick wall right out of the gates. Our entire project is stored on our shared access dropbox account so we can work on the same classes etc. This has been fine until we attempt to develop a DB that is stored on dropbox. Each time we attempt to open our project in our IDE we receive an issue to resolve: Cannot find derby.jar
Because of this, we each create conflicting path names to the project's derby file, as dropbox is stored on each of our separate machines. e.g "C:..\DropBox\Project\derbyclient.jar"
This in turn prevents each other's IDEs synchronizing with the DB we created.
What a mess, any help (or alternative approaches) would be greatly appreciated.
Ben.
How about making sure your dropbox folders have the exact same path on both computers. This might involv one of you to re-install or reconfigure Dropbox.
Consider using real source control, like Subversion, Git, Mercurial etc. That is also handy if you need to go back to an earlier version of the code. And it is also great to document changes.
Related
In my scenario, I have two people that do work on the same code base. Their only available workspace is a shared dev environment (where the files built are used to host the dev version of the site to boot). As such, they perform their work directly in that location. I've recently introduced source control to the project, and turned that location into a Git repository.
Let me preface by saying: Yes, I would love it if the dev host spot was a deploy-to spot, and these people had their own local copies of the source code. But that isn't feasible right now.
My question: Is it possible for two different Windows users/Git users (they have separate accounts that they can use to interact with GitHub/etc. with) to share the same folder? My hope would be that SourceTree (our weapon of choice) or Git, at least, wouldn't have a problem with this: Just show diffs of what's changed, and use the currently-logged-in user's information when making commits/other actions.
It looks like that while SourceTree has separate installation directories, it still embeds some account information in the .git folder itself. When I try to interact with Git (via a pull for example), it first tries to prompt for new credentials/etc., but shortly thereafter it says "please enter password for {other-user}" without an option to hop usernames.
It looks like we'll just have to do things the right way after all. Painful (for them) but no choice.
I don't know if it is possible or not.. I just wanted to work on a vb6 project remotely. For instance, My friend is working on a vb6 project. and I want to work on that project from my computer. But we are only connected to each other via internet. Is it possible to work on a same vb6 project file from local machine and a remote access also?
The same project file? No, it can't be open in two places at once.
But you can do like every other developer in the world and use a version control system. There are lots of free options available online, like Bitbucket, GitHub, and Assembla.
What you do is create an account on one of those sites, upload your code to the website, and then you and your coworker can each check out a copy of the source. Whenever you make a significant change, you upload your changes back to the website, and your coworker can update his local copy with the new changes (or vice versa).
Of course, there are lots of different options for version control systems: Git, Mercurial (Hg), and Subversion (SVN) just to name a few. You'll need to do some research online to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each, and see which one you prefer.
I believe all of the sites I linked to have a "how to" or "getting started" guide that you will probably find rather useful.
After reading Michael Lopp's book "Being Geek," I started using Dropbox as a means of synchronizing files between my home computer and work computer. It's been fantastic, it really makes it painless to keep track of the latest version of files you're working on.
My question has to do with people's experience with this tool, especially programmers who may have used it to develop larger projects.
Right now, I see 3 main uses of Dropbox:
1. synchronize files between home and work computers
2. version control (you have to log into the dropbox site to access previous versions)
3. off-site backup
Right now I'm using it as my main backup tool, which I'm not sure is a good idea. But right now I have a local (working) copy of my entire project "checked out" on each computer (my home laptop and my work computer), and additionally, my entire project is kept on the dropbox site. So I'm thinking, if anything happens to one of my computers, or both, I'll still have that off-site backup available and I'll simply have to reinstall dropbox to access all my files.
Does anyone have experience with doing this? Has anyone done a major file recovery using dropbox? Or is this even widely used? Thanks for your feedback in advance.
Using Dropbox to maintain several files and its associated metadata when those files are historized in a VCS is always a bit tricky because of potential corruption issue (if one of those metadata part of the repository isn't correctly synchronized, you can end up with a non_working repo)
That is why I always use with DropBox:
a DVCS (like Git): I can work directly in a working tree within a DropBox repo or I can clone said repo anywhere else outside the DropBox if I need to,
a single bundle file to which I can push at any time the changes from my local repo, wherever that repo might be.
That way, the only file that really need to be in sync in DropBox is that unique bundle file (representing a bare repo as one file).
See "Git with DropBox" for more.
I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible.
Currently our team has a VSS database where our projects are stored.
Developers grab the code and place on their localhost machine and develop locally.
Designated developer grabs latest version and pushes to development server.
The problem is, when a file is removed from the project (by deleting it in VS2008) then the next time another developer (not the one who deleted it) checks in, it prompts them to check in those deleted files because they still have a copy on their local machine.
Is there a way around this? To have VSS instruct the client machine to remove these files and not prompt them to check back in? What is the preferred approach for this?
Edit Note(s):
I agree SVN is better than VSS
I agree Web Application project is better than Web Site project
Problem: This same thing happens with files which are removed from class libraries.
You number one way around this is to stop using web site projects. Web Site Projects cause visual studio to automatically add anything it finds in the project path to the project.
Instead, move to Web Application Projects which don't have this behavior problem.
Web Site projects are good for single person developments.
UPDATE:
VB shops from the days gone past had similiar issues in that whatever they had installed affected the build process. You might take a page from their playbook and have a "clean" build machine. Prior to doing a deployment you would delete all of the project folders, then do a get latest. This way you would be sure that the only thing deployed is what you have in source control.
Incidentally, this is also how the TFS Build server works. It deletes the workspace, then creates a new one and downloads the necessary project files.
Further, you might consider using something like Cruise Control to handle builds.
Maybe the dev should take care to only check in or add things that they have been working on. Its kind of sloppy if they are adding things that they were not even using.
Your best solution would be to switch to a better version control system, like SVN.
At my job we recently acquired a project from an outsourcing company who did use VSS as their version control. We were able to import all of the change history into SVN from VSS, and get up and running pretty quickly with SVN at that point.
And with SVN, you can set up ignores for files and folders, so the files in your web projects dont get put into SVN and the ignore attributes are checked out onto each developer's machine
I believe we used VSSMigrate to do the migration to SVN http://www.poweradmin.com/sourcecode/vssmigrate.aspx
VSS is an awful versioning system and you should switch to SVN but that's got nothing to do with the crux of the problem. The project file contains references to what files are actually part of the project. If the visual studio project isn't checked in along with the changes to it, theres no way for any other developer to be fully updated hence queries to delete files when they grab the latest from VSS. From there you've got multiple choices...
Make the vbproj part of the repository. Any project level changes will be part of the commit and other developers can be notified. Problem here is it's also going to be on the dev server. Ideally you could use near the same process to deploy to dev as you would to deploy as release. This leads into the other way...
SVN gives you hooks for almost all major events, where hooks are literally just a properly named batch file / exe. For your purposes, you could use a post-commit hook to push the appropriate files, say via ftp, to the server on every commit. File problems solved, and more importantly closer towards the concept of continuous integration.
Something you may want to consider doing:
Get Latest (Recursive)
Check In ...
Its a manual process, but it may give you the desired result, plus if VS talks about deleted files, you know they should be deleted from the local machine in step 1.
Over the years I have vacillated between having my project/source folders in a directory one level removed from the root (e.g. D:\Projects) and keeping them in the default location for Visual Studio.
In the past, I resisted storing anything in the various "My Documents" folders established by Win 95, Win 98, and XP. I finally switched to storing them in the Documents folder since Vista shortened the path and I got tired of changing default directories for my dev tools. However, now I find myself leaning toward creating a folder off root again since I am setting up a new machine.
I get tired of the long paths you have to navigate to when stuff is stored in the documents folders. Also, I don't backup source code and database files like I do with my other documents since I use a VCS for source code. However, it seems you are always fighting to maintain a "non-standard" source location since every dev tool generally wants to store stuff in a subfolder of documents.
I would like to hear other's opinions on this subject.
I think it depends on your use... I prefer to have my development projects on a separate drive/partition, so will usually use the following convention D:\projects\{company-name}\({client-name}|internal)\{project-name} Where the client-name comes into play is when the work is by a given company, but for another. I keep my projects under D:\projects\personal\... This allows for a better structure.
As to backup strategies, imho this is what source control is for. I prefer subversion, and have a backup strategy for the svn server. Although I didn't much care for ankh 1.x, the 2.x version, along with TortoiseSVN have worked pretty well for me. As a matter of practice, I tend to checkin often, and try to only checkin code in a runnable state (though new features/code may not work).
In clear violation of my Unix past I use c:\dev (for development) or whatever other drive I use for development. Note: It is advisable NOT to use the system partition for development as software development really fragments the disk.
I never had any reason to use another directory - except for some projects where "company standards" forced everybody to have the development directory on the root of the C: drive. (really! They had hardcoded paths to c:\whatever)
During development I sometimes check out multiple versions of the source to different directoies - if only to find out that the version committed into the version control system of the day really has every file checked in. (Sometimes I add a file to the development directory but forget to check it in.)
So I think it is rather irrelevant where your development directory is, as long as the path is typable for you (I prefer short paths) and does not contain white space for the usual reasons on windows (if you want to do some scripting).
I preferred location at another partition. Because projects have many and many small files and if you use SVN or other revision control system this files have very high fragmentation and slowing system if are storing at OS partition.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I guess you can put your projects in My Documents and use a symbolic link to the directory in your root folder. By doing that you can access your files both ways and solve problems like changing directory for tools. Info about symbolic links in Vista
If you’re the only one using your computer I don’t really see why you should put your code in the profile directory, backup should be done using a version control system anyway.
I store "active" projects on a secondary drive, one level from the root. It's much more easy to get quickly to that folder (even if VS2008 has this nice "Open Folder in windows explorer" now). It's also convenient for backups, format/reinstall, etc. The "less active" projects are stored on a NAS for quick reference. All are also stored on a remote SVN server that is backuped. (I'd also recommend not using # in folder for web application as it (sometimes) create strange errors from the development web server)
I use SUBST (run on startup) to map some random folder to a high-lettered drive. Then I can put my stuff anywhere, and move it around, and yet I always get to refer to it by Y: or Q: or whatever.
This is one of those extra layers of indirection that are said to solve every problem.
For personal projects I just put them on the desktop (although I do move the desktop to D:\Desktop). They are archived off to my documents when they become inactive.
For work I have all the projects in a C:\Sourcecode folder inside a dedicated development virtual machine.
Just one question, do your primarily develop desktop apps or web apps?
If you are constantly writing web apps, here's what works for me:
Create a folder: c:\dev or c:\sites (keep it simple)
Register the folder as a virtual directory in IIS
Create a different folder for each of your projects and create a web application in IIS for each of them
One advantage this setup might have is that, its easier for you to navigate your site in the browser, i.e less typing, easier to remember, standardization for all your other apps.
my 2cents.
it is better to keep your project in the other partition else than window and i think as i do
d:\projects\"some grouping of project own your own choice"\projectname
e.g.
d:\projects\UNIversty\admission
d:\projects\universry\examination
d:\projects\planners\ipp