Coming from a Unix background and used to working with the Makefileto build stuff, I now have to find my way through the maze of twisty little passages known as Visual Studio 2017.
Basically: I just want to save a solution that I've imported into Visual Studio 2017 (e.g. to move it to another machine) to some sensible structure. I am unable to figure out how to do that!
The solution I work with comes from GitHub and the package is about 590 Kbyte and consists of 32 files. (I downloaded the .zip and unpacked it, then opened in the IDE by clicking on the .sln-file.
After running it (unchanged) in Visual Studio, it has ballooned to 4 Mbyte and 134 files. Obviously a lot of temporary files has been created as a result of me running it. Making a copy of this bloated directory structure is not practical - and some other way (i.e. the method for saving used by the guy who shared his solution on GitHub) must exist.
I want to save it with all those temporary files removed.
There is Build » Clean Solution – but it does not seem to get get rid of the temporary files.
I've also tried: File » Save all. I do no understand how this commend is supposed to work. It does not ask where to save tings, but just says "Item(s) saved" at the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Looking at things in the file system, I am unable to located anything saved. To me, it looks like this command does nothing.
I've searched, but so far found nothing for Visual Studio 2017 (recipes for older versions does not seem to work anymore.)
Saving a solution is something developers do a lot, so there must be something obvious I've missed.
There is not really the concept of "Save As..." for a solution. If you want to copy the whole solution elsewhere you would usually just copy the whole folder it's in to somewhere else.
The reasons you have many extra files are:
There will be a .git sub-folder which contains the Git repository. If you don't need to retain any link to this, you can delete / avoid copying this. Depending on how much history is in the Git repo this folder can even be much larger than the solution itself.
VS will create a .vs sub-folder for various housekeeping activities; you can usually avoid copying this.
In each project's folder, after you've built the solution, there will be obj and bin sub-folders. These are recreated as needed at build time and are not needed for a copy.
If you copy everything ignoring the above, you will probably find the size of the target is more as you were expecting.
In the main project of my VS Solution I have a Resources folder with some required external tools. When building and publishing the solution, I get a .\Resources* with all required files there.
So far so good.
However I have to move some files to the parent directory.
My first attempt was do so with the Post Build Events. It works and does move them the correct folder.
Nevertheless in the publish output they still appear in the Resources folder and I need them in the parent one :/
Is there any way to setup the target output path for resources in Visual Studio?
After some research and experimental, I solved my problem.
Still, here's what I learned in the process.
The first attempt was adding the file to the project root and mark it as a resource. After publishing it worked. But having those files in the project root its lame.
Since I needed some *.exe files compiled in another VS solution, added them as a project reference. Gave it a try and it passed the "Publish" test. But still.. not the best way to do it.
After that, with some scripting and a post-build event, I copied the required files to the correct folder. Works.. but after publishing, they don't appear in the package.
However, there is still a possibility with the Mage tool:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/acz3y3te.aspx
This lead to some promissing experiments, however they ended up helping me realize how limited the MS ClickOnce is, so I decided to try other tools.
Here's a good start to follow:
What alternatives are there to ClickOnce?
I had a similar situation once. I found it became more trouble than it was worth to customize output paths and such in Visual Studio, to the extent that I wanted.
I ended up letting Visual Studio do its own thing with regards to file/project structure, and wrote a post-build script to copy everything that was needed into a final, 'publish-ready' directory.
I then set the execution target in Visual Studio to the new location, so I could run/debug as normal, but with the new folder that was organized how I needed it. Careful, I think this is a user project setting; so other developers will need to do this on their machines too, if they so desire.
I do recall changing some output paths and such to make the post-build script more simple. But changing things like that can lead to annoyances when you add new projects to the solution; you might need to configure them to match. It's all a trade-off :)
Two ideas:
Maybe you could move your resources into another project - a project just for resources - and then set their Build Action to Content and Copy To Output to true. Then reference this new project and build the solution. (This may not work as you want, just an idea).
Why not make your resources embedded resources instead. Keep them all within the Resources\ directory and access them programatically?
In an earlier question, I've found out that sadly Solution Folders are not real folders inside a directory.
I wonder if there is an AddOn or Macro that adds this functionality? i.e. when I create a Solution Folder, it created a real folder. When I Create a new Item (Right Click => Add => New Item) it automatically moves them into that folder, removing causes it to delete it from disk (after asking) etc.
This is for Visual Studio 2005, although we might upgrade to 2008 in a few months.
As of now, this doesn't seem to be possible in either VS 2005, 2008 and 2010 and there is no AddIn for this.
I too thought it was a strange idea. However it can be a useful tool to logically group projects in solutions without necessarily moving around folders in the file system.
I suspect you need this for revision control tool. In that case Look at AnkhSVN.
Maybe what you want is to add files to a solution folder as «links», i.e., keeping the files where they are but giving them a different organization inside the solution.
(when you add an existing file to a solution folder or to a normal project folder, if it is in a different corresponding physical folder, the file is copied).
It usually stays unnoticed, an option in the «Add > Existing Item ...» dialog where you can choose "Add As Link", instead of the "Add".
This allows to share files amongst projects, or, simply, organize them differently.
What I oftem miss is the possibility to add "virtual" folders inside a project, for organizational purposes, without breaking the namespace/folder best-practice.
Can't really get the point you want to add this function.
Sometimes you want to know if it can do this , however, the answer may be no. But it is not necessary means you can't achieve your original goal, there still a few ways to work around it without this.
Additionally, VS solution suppose to be the shortcut of your project settings and should not been included in any hard-code, the solutions may be various between the PCs and IDE envrionment.
I didn't really use VS2005 much, but have been using VS2008 for the past year.
It has a tick box for creating a solution folder when you create a new solution/project.
If you then use the "Solution Explorer" window you can create and manipulate folders and class files within them. This will actually create new directories that match.
Deletion of files from within the Solution Explorer will also delete the actual files from disk.
UPDATE:
This is one of my most-visited questions, and yet I still haven't really found a satisfactory solution for my project. One idea I read in an answer to another question is to create a tool which can build solutions 'on the fly' for projects that you pick from a list. I have yet to try that though.
How do you structure a very large application?
Multiple smallish projects/assemblies in one big solution?
A few big projects?
One solution per project?
And how do you manage dependencies in the case where you don't have one solution.
Note: I'm looking for advice based on experience, not answers you found on Google (I can do that myself).
I'm currently working on an application which has upward of 80 dlls, each in its own solution. Managing the dependencies is almost a full time job. There is a custom in-house 'source control' with added functionality for copying dependency dlls all over the place. Seems like a sub-optimum solution to me, but is there a better way? Working on a solution with 80 projects would be pretty rough in practice, I fear.
(Context: winforms, not web)
EDIT: (If you think this is a different question, leave me a comment)
It seems to me that there are interdependencies between:
Project/Solution structure for an application
Folder/File structure
Branch structure for source control (if you use branching)
But I have great difficulty separating these out to consider them individually, if that is even possible.
I have asked another related question here.
Source Control
We have 20 or 30 projects being built into 4 or 5 discrete solutions. We are using Subversion for SCM.
1) We have one tree in SVN containing all the projects organised logically by namespace and project name. There is a .sln at the root that will build them all, but that is not a requirement.
2) For each actual solution we have a new trunks folder in SVN with SVN:External references to all the required projects so that they get updated from their locations under the main tree.
3) In each solution is the .sln file plus a few other required files, plus any code that is unique to that solution and not shared across solutions.
Having many smaller projects is a bit of a pain at times (for example the TortoiseSVN update messages get messy with all those external links) but does have the huge advantage that dependancies are not allowed to be circular, so our UI projects depend on the BO projects but the BO projects cannot reference the UI (and nor should they!).
Architecture
We have completely switched over to using MS SCSF and CAB enterprise pattern to manage the way our various projects combine and interact in a Win Forms interface. I am unsure if you have the same problems (multiple modules need to share space in a common forms environment) but if you do then this may well bring some sanity and convention to how you architect and assemble your solutions.
I mention that because SCSF tends to merge BO and UI type functions into the same module, whereas previously we maintained a strict 3 level policy:
FW - Framework code. Code whose function relates to software concerns.
BO - Business Objects. Code whose function relates to problem domain concerns.
UI - Code which relates to the UI.
In that scenario dependancies are strictly UI -> BO -> FW
We have found that we can maintain that structure even while using SCSF generated modules so all is good in the world :-)
To manage dependencies, whatever the number of assemblies/namespaces/projects you have, you can have a glance at the tool NDepend.
Personnaly, I foster few large projects, within one or several solutions if needed. I wrote about my motivations to do so here: Benefit from the C# and VB.NET compilers perf
I think it's quite important that you have a solution that contains all your 80 projects, even if most developers use other solutions most of the time. In my experience, I tend to work with one large solution, but to avoid the pain of rebuilding all the projects each time I hit F5, I go to Solution Explorer, right-click on the projects I'm not interested in right now, and do "Unload Project". That way, the project stays in the solution but it doesn't cost me anything.
Having said that, 80 is a large number. Depending on how well those 80 break down into dicrete subsystems, I might also create other solution files that each contain a meaningful subset. That would save me the effort of lots of right-click/Unload operations. Nevertheless, the fact that you'd have one big solution means there's always a definitive view of their inter-dependencies.
In all the source control systems that I've worked with, their VS integration chooses to put the .sln file in source control, and many don't work properly unless that .sln file is in source control. I find that intriguing, since the .sln file used to be considered a personal thing, rather than a project-wide thing. I think the only kind of .sln file that definitely merits source control is the "one-big-solution" that contains all projects. You can use it for automated builds, for example. As I said, individuals might create their own solutions for convenience, and I'm not against those going into source control, but they're more meaningful to individuals than to the project.
I think the best solution is to break it in to smaller solutions. At the company I currently work for, we have the same problem; 80 projects++ in on solution. What we have done, is to split into several smaller solutions with projects belonging together. Dependent dll's from other projects are built and linked in to the project and checked in to the source control system together with the project. It uses more disk space, but disk is cheap. Doing it this way, we can stay with version 1 of a project until upgrading to version 1.5 is absolutely necessary. You still have the job with adding dll's when deciding to upgrade to a other version of the dll though. There is a project on google code called TreeFrog that shows how to structure the solution and development tree. It doesn't contain mush documentation yet, but I guess you can get a idea of how to do it by looking at the structure.
A method that i've seen work well is having one big solution which contains all the projects, for allowing a project wide build to be tested (No one really used this to build on though as it was too big.), and then having smaller projects for developers to use which had various related projects grouped together.
These did have depencies on other projects but, unless the interfaces changed, or they needed to update the version of the dll they were using, they could continue to use the smaller projects without worrying about everything else.
Thus they could check-in projects while they were working on them, and then pin them (after changing the version number), when other users should start using them.
Finally once or twice a week or even more frequently the entire solution was rebuild using pinned code only, thus checking if the integration was working correctly, and giving testers a good build to test against.
We often found that huge sections of code didn't change frequently, so it was pointless loading it all the time. (When you're working on the smaller projects.)
Another advantage of using this approach is in certain cases we had pieces of functionality which took months to complete, by using the above approach meant this could continue without interrupting other streams of work.
I guess one key criteria for this is not having lots of cross dependencies all over your solutions, if you do, this approach might not be appropriate, if however the dependencies are more limited, then this might be the way to go.
For a couple of systems I've worked on we had different solutions for different components. Each solution had a common Output folder (with Debug and Release sub-folders)
We used project references within a solution and file references between them. Each project used Reference Paths to locate the assemblies from other solutions. We had to manually edit the .csproj.user files to add a $(Configuration) msbuild variable to the reference paths as VS insists on validating the path.
For builds outside of VS I've written msbuild scripts that recursively identify project dependencies, fetch them from subversion and build them.
I gave up on project references (although your macros sound wonderful) for the following reasons:
It wasn't easy to switch between different solutions where sometimes dependency projects existed and sometimes didn't.
Needed to be able to open the project by itself and build it, and deploy it independently from other projects. If built with project references, this sometimes caused issues with deployment, because a project reference caused it to look for a specific version or higher, or something like that. It limited the mix and match ability to swap in and out different versions of dependencies.
Also, I had projects pointing to different .NET Framework versions, and so a true project reference wasn't always happening anyways.
(FYI, everything I have done is for VB.NET, so not sure if any subtle difference in behavior for C#)
So, I:
I build against any project that is open in the solution, and those that aren't, from a global folder, like C:\GlobalAssemblies
My continuous integration server keeps this up to date on a network share, and I have a batch file to sync anything new to my local folder.
I have another local folder like C:\GlobalAssembliesDebug where each project has a post build step that copies its bin folder's contents to this debug folder, only when in DEBUG mode.
Each project has these two global folders added to their reference paths. (First the C:\GlobalAssembliesDebug, and then C:\GlobalAssemblies). I have to manually add this reference paths to the .vbproj files, because Visual Studio's UI addes them to the .vbprojuser file instead.
I have a pre-build step that, if in RELEASE mode, deletes the contents from C:\GlobalAssembliesDebug.
In any project that is the host project, if there are non dlls that I need to copy (text files outputted to other project's bin folders that I need), then I put a prebuild step on that project to copy them into the host project.
I have to manually specify the project dependencies in the solution properties, to get them to build in the correct order.
So, what this does is:
Allows me to use projects in any solution without messing around with project references.
Visual Studio still lets me step into dependency projects that are open in the solution.
In DEBUG mode, it builds against open loaded projects. So, first it looks to the C:\GlobalAssembliesDebug, then if not there, to C:\GlobalAssemblies
In RELEASE mode, since it deletes everything from C:\GlobalAssembliesDebug, it only looks to C:\GlobalAssemblies. The reason I want this is so that released builds aren't built against anything that was temporarily changed in my solution.
It is easy to load and unload projects without much effort.
Of course, it isn't perfect. The debugging experience is not as nice as a project reference. (Can't do things like "go to definition" and have it work right), and some other little quirky things.
Anyways, that's where I am on my attempt to make things work for the best for us.
We have one gigantic solution on the source control, on the main branch.
But, every developer/team working on the smaller part of the project, has its own branch which contains one solution with only few projects which are needed. In that way, that solution is small enough to be easily maintenaced, and do not influence on the other projects/dlls in the larger solution.
However, there is one condition for this: there shouldn't be too much interconnected projects within solution.
OK, having digested this information, and also answers to this question about project references, I'm currently working with this configuration, which seems to 'work for me':
One big solution, containing the application project and all the dependency assembly projects
I've kept all project references, with some extra tweaking of manual dependencies (right click on project) for some dynamically instantiated assemblies.
I've got three Solution folders (_Working, Synchronised and Xternal) - given that my source control isn't integrated with VS (sob), this allows me to quickly drag and drop projects between _Working and Synchronised so I don't lose track of changes. The XTernal folder is for assemblies that 'belong' to colleagues.
I've created myself a 'WorkingSetOnly' configuration (last option in Debug/Release drop-down), which allows me to limit the projects which are rebuilt on F5/F6.
As far as disk is concerned, I have all my projects folders in just one of a few folders (so just one level of categorisation above projects)
All projects build (dll, pdb & xml) to the same output folder, and have the same folder as a reference path. (And all references are set to Don't copy) - this leaves me the choice of dropping a project from my solution and easily switching to file reference (I've got a macro for that).
At the same level as my 'Projects' folder, I have a 'Solutions' folder, where I maintain individual solutions for some assemblies - together with Test code (for example) and documentation/design etc specific to the assembly.
This configuration seems to be working ok for me at the moment, but the big test will be trying to sell it to my colleagues, and seeing if it will fly as a team setup.
Currently unresolved drawbacks:
I still have a problem with the individual assembly solutions, as I don't always want to include all the dependent projects. This creates a conflict with the 'master' solution. I've worked around this with (again) a macro which converts broken project references to file references, and restores file references to project references if the project is added back.
There's unfortunately no way (that I've found so far) of linking Build Configuration to Solution Folders - it would be useful to be able to say 'build everything in this folder' - as it stands, I have to update this by hand (painful, and easy to forget). (You can right click on a Solution Folder to build, but that doesn't handle the F5 scenario)
There is a (minor) bug in the Solution folder implementation which means that when you re-open a solution, the projects are shown in the order they were added, and not in alphabetical order. (I've opened a bug with MS, apparently now corrected, but I guess for VS2010)
I had to uninstall the CodeRushXPress add-in, because it was choking on all that code, but this was before having modified the build config, so I'm going to give it another try.
Summary - things I didn't know before asking this question which have proved useful:
Use of solution folders to organise solutions without messing with disk
Creation of build configurations to exclude some projects
Being able to manually define dependencies between projects, even if they are using file references
This is my most popular question, so I hope this answer helps readers. I'm still very interested in further feedback from other users.
I'm trying to build a small VS 2005 solution I've just checked out of source control, and I'm getting this easy to understand error:
...\AssemblyInfo.cs' could not be
opened ('The system cannot find the
file specified. ') (The file is fairly
obviously missing)
Because this file's automatically generated, I've never paid it much heed before, and in VS 2003 (which I still work with day to day - pity me) it never seems to matter if it's missing.
So 2 questions:
1. How can I get VS 2005 to regenerate the file.
2. Could anyone explain to me in a couple of sentences what the assembly info file is all about, why it's generated, why it's a good idea to have an automatically generated file critical to my solution building etc etc.
Thanks - Andrew.
Edit: OK, I've googling some more, and it's probably significant that this is in an Nunit Test Project.
Update: Deleting the reference in solution explorer an Alex suggested did the trick, and the project now builds, but I'm not entirely happy with that as a solution. If the file is so unimportant, why is it generated in the first place? And if the file does perform a vital task, what am I missing out on by just deleting it?
Also, is it even possible to get it back? Either by getting VS to regenerate it, or by manually hacking one up (possibly using another as a template)?
This file contains assembly-wide settings like assembly version, name, etc. It is automatically generated when you change those settings using properties pages of the project. You should have this file in the project with sort of transparent icon (I think it is in resource folder or something like this by default). Locate it in the project tree and delete it. Visual studio will stop looking for it during build.
PS: assuming the path starts with .. and not ... then this file should be located one folder up from the project in the source control. So you can try looking there.