This may be a stupid question, but is there a nice way for a small team (not using TFS) to easily share code across VS 2010 solutions?
IE, if Project1.DLL is referenced in Project2, then everytime Project1 is republished, the reference in project two will have to be updated.
Am I making any sense?
Thanks!
Here's how I would organize your repository:
Explanation:
Both Project1 and Project2 should have their own codeline, at the same level.
Project dependencies are handled by branching /Project1/Main into /Project2/Main/Dependencies/Project1
Project1 can be consumed by more projects.
Code changes in Project1 must be done in /Project1/Main and changes must be branched into the projects that needs the changes.
I do not known Vault, but I hope it can handle this setup. I have a setup like this using Team Foundation Server 2010.
Related
I have my own TFS (visual studio online) and work TFS. In my TFS located my own projects and, in particular, the project with useful utilities. I want to connect it to the work TFS solution, but keep getting an error, which essentially boils down to the fact that you can not connect a project in more than one TFS. Can I achieve the desired result?
No you cannot use multiple Team Foundation Server instances at one time. When you switch a project, you switch to the TFS server that it's stored in.
The recommended way to share utility code like you're talking about is by sharing only the binaries. This can be done using NuGet. You can setup your own NuGet repository and then let your utility project publish to your NuGet server. Other projects can include your NuGet packages just as you use external packages.
You can find a great overview of what NuGet can do here.
We recently migrated to TFS 2010, and have created a new Team Project. (The old one was created in 2005, and seems to be missing key metadata to allow full functionality in 2010). We've copied all our source, and have figured out how to copy our work items to the new team project, but we can't figure out how to migrate our build definitions.
Is there a way to do this, or will we have to re-create them manually?
Thanks!
[EDIT]
Jeff-thank you for the reply! After reading it, and more deeply considering my situation, I realize that my description (and probably my entire question) was flawed.
We originally upgraded our 2008 team project to 2010. It had previously been upgraded from 2005. Up to this point, we've been using CruiseControl.Net to manage our builds. One of our team noticed that our upgraded project was missing some key metadata, and theorized that stuff had not been added in the migration process, so he created a new 2010 team project and imported our source as a test. Now we have two 2010 team projects: the originally migrated one (that we're all using), and the "from-scratch" one.
In the meantime, I was experimenting with TFS Build on the originally migrated project. I created a dozen or so builds, and was refining them, but we haven't moved off of CC.Net yet.
The decision was made to start using the "from-scratch" project, so I was hoping to somehow copy the builds from one project to the other. I don't see a way to do that... there is no build proj file to copy (TFS seems to keep the build definitions internal in 2010).
Normally, when you upgrade to TFS 2010, any build definitions you previously had will be automatically upgraded with the associated Team Project. It sounds like, at least in your case, that your Team Project did not upgrade completely/correctly so you had to start over with a new Team Project.
To copy your build definition, you will need to:
Copy the TFSBuild.proj file(s) from your old Team Project to the new Team Project - under whatever version control folder makes sense.
Create a new TFS 2010 build and select the Upgrade Template (in the Process tab).
Set the Configuration Folder Path property to the location of the copied TFSBuild.proj file copied in step 1 above.
Fill in the remaining required settings.
Hope this helps.
There's been significant changes to how builds are done from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. One of the reason's why it appears that 'stuff has not been added to the migration process' is because it just does not exist. Even upgrading from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 had a bit desired in it's completeness.
Jeff provided some good guidance to use the Upgrade Template, this will actually call the tfsbuild.proj file that was carried over from TFS 2008.
As a good practice, you'll want to create a copy of the DefaultTemplate when a new build definition is created for a corresponding relationship. Do this while creating the build definition in the process part of setup. There is a detail expansion arrow that will allow you to create a new, which is a copy of the default, and name it whatever you like. Unless of course there will be absolutely no customization done to the build definition or all of the builds in that project will be following exactly the same steps. i.e.: dev_sso_ci (build definition) corresponds to dev_sso_ci.xaml in the BuildProcessTemplates folder.
Hope this helps too.
I have decided to start using Team City as my continuous integration software and I am having some problems how I should handle my project references as the assemblies my projects depends upon are located at different locations in my developer solutions and the solutions in team city (I am using the vs2008 solution files option for the builds in team city). The problem is that the projects builds in development and fails in team city.
How should I handle the different project references in the project files?
ex. My MVC app references a common util assembly I use in other projects as well. In my developer solution I add this project to the solution but I do not want this in team city build so I have a different solution file there.
It sounds like you should split your code up into multiple solutions. When projects in one solution need to access binaries from projects in another solution, then they should not add those foreign projects into the solution. Instead of using project refrences, use file references.
This means that you need to deploy the results of completed builds to some common location, posisbly a share.
See patterns & practices: Visual Studio 2005 Team System Guidance. It's for TFS and 2005, butthe general concepts apply to many other source control systems.
I have 3 .net projects.
Project1.dll is generated by a VS2008 project.
Project2.dll is generated by a VS2005 project that references Project1.dll.
Project3.dll is generated by a VS2008 project that references both Project1.dll and Project2.dll.
Right now, I build Project1.dll, and manually copy it to the place where Project 2 can pick it up.
Then I build Project2.dll and manually copy it and Project1.dll to the place where Project 3 can pick them up.
Obviously I'm doing something wrong (manual). What is the correct way to keep my projects' references up to date?
Updating Project2 to VS2008 and then creating one solution containing all 3 projects is not an option at this time. We have a 3rd party visualstudio plugin that does not yet work in VS2008. Project2 must stay in VS2005
De-updating Project1 and Project3 to VS2005 and then creating one solution is not an option either. We're relying on C# 3.0 and .net 3.5 features in those projects.
Probably the best option would be to have a common build folder for all three projects. This can be done in the Project Properties-> Build -> Output path. Then point the references to the output folder. That way anytime you build any of the lower projects, the higher projects would have the latest versions. You can set the path per configurations (Debug, Release) as well, so you won't need to change that for each type of build.
How about a pre-build event for Project3, that goes out and uses a batch file to build Project1 copy it to Project2 folder and then build project2 and copy it to project3 folder.
I would recommend sharing the csproj/vbproj files between the solutions. The format of the project files is compatible between the two versions of studio (solution files are not, however), and as long as your VS2008 projects are targeting the 2.0 runtime you should have no trouble compiling them. This will allow you to reference the projects, which will take care of dependencies.
The only place where this gets hairy is if you have a web project that needs to work between the two versions of studio. In that case there are some modifications to the project files which will point to the correct MSBuild target files.
We use a build script that handles the dependencies, builds the DLLs and does what you're doing manually.
A trick I have used in the past is to move everything to 2008. Then I setup a special solution in 2005 for project two and use it to work with the addin. Getting this to work just depends on how bad project two behaves in 2008.
In Eclipse, I have a workspace that contains all of my projects. Each project builds and compiles separately. A project does not interact with another project.
How does this relate to Visual Studio and Projects/Solutions there?
A VS project is it's own entity. It will build and compile by itself. A Solution is just a way to contain multiple projects. The projects don't necessarily need the other projects to compile (though, they can depend on the other projects).
This just lets you conceptually group projects together into one Big Project. For instance, you can have a separate testing project. It depends on the code from the actual project, and should be kept together with the actual project, but it does not need to be in the same exe/dll.
Each VS project builds a single EXE or DLL. The solution is just a collection of related projects.
So VS project:Eclipse project::VS solution:Eclipse workspace.
Another way to look at it is, a solution is a container for projects. For most of my work , I create each tier as a project within a solution so my tree looks like:
My Web App or Win App
Presentation Layer
files...
Business Layer
files...
Data Access
files
Your mileage may vary
#Thomas Owens:
Yes, some (most?) people using Eclipse have more than one workspace. It's what surprised me the most when I first started using Eclipse, so I'm replying here to make this comment more visible.
The thing that may be throwing you off is the following:
In VS2003, everything had a Project file and a Solution file. If you had a Solution with one Project, you could open the Solution and see the one Project. If you opened the Project, it would try and create a new Solution file to contain the Project. But web projects and Winform projects all had Projects and Solutions.
In VS2005 this changed a bit - by default now, Web projects no longer had Project files. They had received feedback from some web developers that didn't like Project files - their take was that if a file is in the directory, it's part of the app. After VS2005 shipped, they got more feedback from developers who did like the Project file notion, so they patched it back in. This is "Web Site" versus "Web Application" in VS2005 (and I can't remember which is which now).
In addition, in VS2005, if you have a Solution open with only one Project, you won't see in the Solution Explorer that there's even a Solution at all, you'll only see the Project (as if it was not in a Solution). Only after adding the second Project will you see that there's a Solution containing them both.
So basically you were on the right track - Solutions and Projects work the same in Visual Studio as they did in Eclipse, it's just some quirks that make things confusing.
A Solution has 0 or many Projects...
There are way too many kinds of web projects in Visual Studio 2008. There are Web Site Projects vs. Web Application Projects and they limit you in different ways. It's a good example of Microsoft providing too many choices instead of focusing on one strong solution. Even within the Web site Project option, there are at least 3 different ways to compile your application.
I found that not always seeing the solution in the Solution Explorer to be irritating. There is a setting in Options->Projects and Solutions->General called "Always Show Solution" which was handy.