I just discovered (the hard way) that if you deploy your application to a device after doing a "Rebuild" or a "Clean -> Build" from Visual Studio your app is first uninstalled and then reinstalled resulting in the isolated storage files being wiped.
The Application Deployment Tool always seems to do uninstall - reinstall irrespective of whether it was an incremental build or not.
Has anybody found a workaround to this? Of course, the most obvious one is never to rebuild your application, but what if you accidentally do? Currently, I don't have all the generated files under source control, so if I were to try to build the app on another computer it would be a rebuild (maybe I will add all the generated junk into source control if no one has a workaround)
If I can suggest an alternative appraoch.. I think you will find it beneficial in other situations as well if you can introduce a little process to the generation of your test data so that it is easier to either a) restore or b) generate.
You could for example have a debug build only feature to upload/download the files on the device to a wcf service running locally on your PC (a simplified version of what Rongchaua did here).
Or, more work, if you are willing, but offering even more additional benefits would be to develop some automated testing capability into your app.. starting with generation of initial test data. Here's something you could look at to get started on that path.
Claus Konrad Blog: WP7: How to unit test a MVVM Light WP7-application
Granted these would take a bit of effort, but it's an approach that gives you some independence from manually generated test data, which in my experience invariably turns out to be a hassle at various times. And once solved, you find all sorts of reasons to thank yourself for doing it later.. whether it be saved time, or more robust testing because you can afford to be more aggresive with your test data/test execution and manage multiple test data configurations.
There is a a workaround:
open the solution configuration manager
next to build is a deploy column, uncheck your project
press F5
This will launch the app that is already on the device without overwriting it (and deleting its storage).
Related
I have a few (3) core projects I want to share across many solutions (12+).
So, say I have 12 websites and they use some shared back end core code (in this case I'm not talking about shared js, css or views - I'm talking about business objects, entity stuff, etc.).
I need to be able to identify which site has which version of the shared code in dev, test, prod, etc. so a developer can get the website code and get the right version of the shared code to develop or patch the website.
And then the MS build server needs to know which version of the shared code to get for the deployment.
To solve this, I'm seeing people branch that core code - which seems absurd to do 12+ times. (I do expect to branch the core code sometimes for things like hot fixes and long running projects.)
I'm also seeing people copy DLLs of the core code and check those in.
I would think I would list the dependencies for my solutions based on TFS label names somewhere so developers can easily get the apps running with the right code and given a tfs label the build server can get the code for the website and the proper version of the core code. I'm using TFS & VS 2013 at the moment too, so there's that.
So, is there a way to do this that's straightforward, supportable/scale-able and intuitive? Thanks - Peter
Labels in TFS is very limited. For example once the label created you couldn't change and update it. If one of your core projects updated, did you need to create a new label for it. If you did and use the new label for one of your solution. However you found there are some bugs in this update, you need a newer update of your core project to fix the bug. Then a newer label created, you need to manually maintain the dependencies which seems not to be an easy job.
Moreover how to list the dependencies for your solutions based on TFS label names? TFS don't have this built-in option, seems the only way is store it in a txt or someother files and check in the source control. Every time the developer open a website application need to check it first and get label from server to their workspace and work on it.
Usually the purpose of sharing code between projects is reducing maintenance. There’s two main code sharing paths: source and binary. The difference between them you could take a look at this blog: Code Sharing in Team Foundation Server
Sharing code between products is a primary cause of quality erosion and elevated bug counts. I would recommend you to build separately and sharing binary output through NuGet which use preferable.
Also take a look below similar questions:
Sharing code between solutions in TFS
TFS 2010 Branch Across Team Projects - Best Practices
Sorry if a similar question has been posed before. There are a lot of deployment questions but none seemed to address my problem.
Anyway. I'm working with asp.net, C# and using Visual Studio.
The Organization I'm working in is changing rapidly. There are a lot of projects coming in the pipeline that will require multiple code changes and iterative deployments over the next few months. While working, these changes are always 'on the forefront', so sometimes I have to code certain parts of the same program multiple times.
Since these projects are all staggered, I can't just make one sweeping change all at once; I have to deploy and redeploy the same program multiple times, using only the changes that are required for that deployment.
If this is confusing, here's a simple example:
Application is being used on an Intranet. This application calls our Database, using Driver A.
There are two environments, test and production.
Certain Stored procedures have to be called with parameters that register 'Test' to allow certain other applications to run even with bad data (for testing purposes).
When deploying applications, these stored procedures have to be modified, removing Test parameters
We have an Operating System upgrade, allowing us to move to a much faster Driver B, but requires changes to be made to the code to use Driver B.
So that's two wholly different deployments where some code must be changed for Deployment 1 and other code must be changed for Deployment 2.
Currently I'm just using notepad for an overall change list, regular debugging break points and a multitude of in-code comments, and then I manually slog through the code to make sure that everything is changed. With hundreds of thousands of lines of code over multiple files, classes, objects, etc. this gets pretty tedious, as well as there being a good chance of missing something (causing it to break) or pushing wrong changes (causing it to either break or allow bad data).
Is there a tool that could be used to help in this situation? Preferably one that I can discern what needs to change for Deployment A and what needs to change for Deployment B? I'm also open to hearing other schools of thought as well (tips are definitely accepted!)
Sure, I understand your problem.
I would suggest a couple of things
Installers : Why don't you think of installers, there are loads of installers i.e Install shield, Wix, MSI installer.
These installers will give you flexibilty to update files which you need to update, i.e. Full Control.
But you need to choose the best of them, I have worked around MSI and Wix a lot, so I know this can sort your problem, however its your call.
Publish : I haven't played around much with this, I have just done website publish. However I know it does wonders, so try it also.
Our issue is as follows:
solution takes a while to start up when running
after hitting run and while monitoring the Output window, constant work done is loading project related files from .net temp dir
this really takes a while
this is a Web Forms app with quite a large set of UI controls/pages and about 250 DLL/component dependencies
references are added as DLL refs and not proj refs
Given the information above, what would be some of the suggestions to speed up solution startup at run times?
Frankly, there may not be a whole lot you can do. But be sure to disable antivirus scanning of the project, as scanning each file as it loads will slow the machine to a crawl.
There are a few other tips floating around, but I'm hoping performance will be improved via an update of some sort.
Lots of links and things to try are here:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/TheLearnedOne/B_4684-Visual-Studio-NET-2010-Performance.html
I have a VS solution containing several projects. While debugging a particular project all the source files are locked by VS. I would like to unlock sources that the debugee doesn't have dependency on. Is there any way to do this within one solution?
UPDATE:
I'm using Win XP SP3 32bit. Visual Studio 2010, C#. Edit and Continue is enabled. The solution contains 6 projects (number in not important actually), 5 of them depend on the data access layer project which uses Entity Framework. None of the 5 have any mutual dependencies. They are WinForms and Console applications. I would like to be able to run one of the projects and make changes to others without stopping the first. The problem is starting and stopping the project take considerable amount of time.
The Edit and Continue feature is preventing you from editing files if the debugger hasn't stopped the program. The simple workaround is Debug + Break All, you should then be able to edit the files, your changes will be immediately effective provided your changes do not violate the restrictions imposed by E+C. This is the most efficient work flow.
The heavy-handed approach is to disable Edit and Continue. Tools + Options, Debugger, Edit and Continue, uncheck the Enable check box.
I don't think that there is a way to avoid that. While debugging Visual Studio lock all files to prevent any change on them, including those on other projects.
You can try to open the project which you are interested on with another Visual Studio instance to make changes to your files or open files singularly with another editor.
This doesn't quite answer the OP's question per se, but for anyone who has stumbled upon this page in the same (very frustrated) boat as I am, this might help.
The solution: start without debugging.
It was driving me absolutely crazy that Visual Studio would not let me edit files while the app was running. My typical workflow is:
Make some changes
Run the app to see the effects of those changes
Based on the results, make more changes, etc. etc.
The problem is Visual Studio was preventing me from step 3. It demands that you STOP running the app before you can even make any changes (including to a XAML file or adding a file to the project), which also means that you can't go back to the app to double-check something while you are actually programming it at the same time (which is how I work, bro).
Thank god I finally discovered if I run without debugging it doesn't impose this ridiculous limitation. It's still a pain in the butt if you actually need to debug something you have to re-run the app in debug mode, but it sure beats having to kill the app before it will even let you edit a file.
Are there any limitations that I might face when using VS Setup Projects?
I plan to use them, but am not sure if this would be a good idea.
Well, in a more advanced setting: VS Setup Projects cannot be automated, e.g. you cannot put your project and the VS Setup Project on a build server and have them built automatically. This might not be an issue for a smaller shop or a single developer, but for a larger enterprise-level development environment, this alone can be quite a killer criteria.
In order to get around this, we use WiX for our setups - more work once up front, but works nicely with continuous integration.
Marc
They are OK, if your starting from scratch I would say look into WIX, or even pony up the cash for Install Shield or one of the other commercial ones, would save you time and money in the long run.
Builds can be very slow, especially if you have a lot of binary files. I have a project with a lot of product images that get packed into the install package, this takes a LONG time, even on a fast machine.
Visual Studio Setup projects lacks a number of key features that Windows Installer Provides. Most notable of these is the 'Feature' feature that allows you to setup several tools that the user can choose to install or exclude. As already recommended, use WiX or a 3rd party full-featured installer tool.
It depends on your project I suppose. It used to be a pain to use to set up web projects, but I think there is an addin now that makes creating a web app setup a lot easier.
More limitations...
There is no way in setup project to perform validation on data that has
been provided by the user on the UI dialogs (acquisition phase).
There is no way to designate a custom action to run with elevated
privileges(System account).
There is no way to make your custom action execute during UI sequence.