I am in a debate about what a best practice would be for naming projects within a .sln on our team. We are working in Visual Studio and debating about what the project naming and placement of classes should be. Here are the two arguments:
There should be a "Common" project which will contain two folders: "Contracts" and "Model". Within "Contracts" folder will be the interfaces and of course within "Model" folder will be the data model. The advantage to this is that there will only be one .dll published which will have both the model and contracts within it.
There should be a "Model" project and a "Contracts" project. "Model" project should contain the data model and the "Contracts" project will contain the interfaces. The advantage here is in the naming, you know what will be in each .dll.
So simplified the question really is, is it better to have two separate projects or one project for the interfaces and model?
I'd separate them into separate projects. Your solution will likely include more DLLs, and you'll want to be able to access the interfaces from any of them. If you dump them into the same DLL with your Models, you run a higher risk of a circular dependency down the road.
It depends, I would keep projects on RE USABILITY basis. Means each project specific to content oriented.
Also note even after keeping separate you can merge them in single dll. So you objective of naming will also be achieved.
Related
I have a set of utility classes that I reuse in several xcode projects.
I want to include the utility classes in every project.
I currently do this by adding inside every xcode project a group and dropping there the files from the file system.
This way, they are included in the compilation.
But every time I do filename changes in the utility classes (e.g. add/rename/delete a file) I have to go through all the projects and reflect the change there.
Some notes:
The projects are irrelevant, i.e. not different products from a suite of products. So I cannot use an all products project and do the separation at the targets level for each of the products.
When I do changes in a utility class from one of the projects, the changes should be reflected in all other projects.
the utility classes are already on a repo of their own.
I prefer not to make copies of the files of the utility classes inside every project
I do not want to do the trip of creating a framework that will then be used by every project. Not all classes are used by every project. I just want to have them compiled as a source files.
As a test, I made a project containing the utility classes and no target, added the project as a child of one of my projects.
I.e. instead of having the yellow folder icon of the file group, I have a project icon containing the files.
The compilation does not seem to pick these files.
Maybe a cmakelists.txt file could serve this purpose? I.e. give to xcode an additional list of files to include in the compilation?
For the Windows's edition of my projects, I use Microsoft's Visual Studio "shared items" project which accomplishes exactly all these requirements.
What is your advice for xcode?
Thanks!
Similar to:
Sharing classes between projects in xcode/objective-c
Sharing classes between Xcode projects
My go project consists of many components. Every component has its own vendor directory, which is populated by the dep. Because components have similar dependencies, there is a huge duplication in vendor directories.
Additionally, vendors are quite big: ~20MB.
My idea is to reduce the size of the repository by defining common vendor, on the top of the project.
project
vendor
|--component1
|----main.go
|----vendor
|--component2
|----main.go
|----vendor
Every component needs to define only dependencies specific to him.
To not provision common dependencies on every dep ensure executed on the component level, we can specify which packages should be ignored in Gopkg.toml file:
ignored = ["github.com/aszecowka/calc"]
Question: Does anyone use this approach? Any alternatives?
Update Context:
In my company we are investigating monorepo approach, we try to consolidate different go projects, but we end up with a really huge repository - mostly because of many vendors directories
There have been many posts on this topic, but I have yet to find the "real" solution.
How does one manage their dependency tree (both compile time and runtime) using MSBuild project files (i.e. Visual Studio project files via project and file references)?
It is well known that project references from child projects will not be copied to an application bin directory if there is no compile time reference, even if there is a runtime dependency, and even if copy-local=true. Hence, any loosely coupled component will not be copied over.
The hack to solve this problem is to include the dependency in the parent project with copy-local=true. However, this basically destroys your dependency tree as you no longer know where the dependency is and ultimately, as your app grows and morphs, you end up with a version of DLL hell. Your parent project ends up with 10s to 100s of dlls, most of which are runtime dependencies of dlls in child projects.
Another hack is to write a custom targets file and call it from every project file: http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2009/09/making-msbuild-visual-studio-to.html. But surely there is a better option. This is such a bread and butter thing. Java devs never have to deal with such trivial issues.
From what I can gather, the Microsoft way to solve this problem is to register every dependency in the GAC for every dev, test and production machine. But this is stupid and annoying. I won't bother giving this option and educated rebuttal.
Avoiding the GAC option, how could one use MSBuild to manage a dependency tree that includes runtime only dependencies? How does Microsoft do it? Surely they don't run custom targets files like the one in the link above.
I hope someone from an enterprise .NET background can step up and offer some real advice on this. Otherwise I'm just going to have to rewrite all my build scripts in NAnt (shudder).
Thanks All.
UPDATE
In response to some comments, the following is a practical example of the issue from my current project.
The app is a Web Application project that exposes a suite of WCF services. It has an external domain DLL containing the external service classes and an internal domain DLL containing internal service POCOs, domain objects and DAOs. There is a separate integration DLL containing interfaces (DTOs) for all the internal domain classes that allows us to completely decouple the external and internal domains. The whole thing is wired up with Spring.net. I hope this is clear, let me know if you need more clarification.
My current build process is to use MSBuild to generate a deployment package for the web application (in TFS Build). So while the whole solution is built initially, only the output from the web application gets packaged. Therefore, the Web Application is treated as the dependency root and I expect that any loosely coupled child references should get copied over on build if they are set to 'copy-always=true'.
So the Web Application contains a reference to the external domain DLL which contains a reference to the internal domain DLL which contains many references to 3rd party libraries and various indirect and loosely coupled dependencies required by the 3rd party libraries.
The problem occurs when there is a 3rd party dependency in the internal domain DLL e.g. oracle.dataaccess which is required by NHibernate at runtime. Even when I set 'copy-always=true' on these DLLs, they do not get copied to the Web App package. The only way I can include them in the package is to add these DLLs to the Web App's references. I don't want to do this because I no longer have a meaningful dependency tree.
I hope this makes the issue clearer. Please let me know if anything is unclear. It's hard to describe this sort of stuff.
If anyone is also having a similar issue, please speak up and share your experience.
I really want to give you a better answer but unfortunately you didn't put enough information about your solution/projects and your dependencies, so I will try to give you several ideas and I hope one of them works.
The easiest thing to do as you said is to set up a separate folder with all of your dependencies and create target file that will copy them to your bin folder. If you have dependencies that are not changing frequently that might work. If another team from your company is building them and they change frequently, this approach is not good.
Another simple approach - if you're referencing your dependencies from your solution only you can change the build path, so that they build directly into the bin folder of your main project. This way you don't have to reference them directly.
Use NuGet. You have a separate team producing loosely coupled dependencies it may make a sense to set up local NuGet repository and use it for that http://juristr.com/blog/2012/04/using-nuget-to-distribute-our-company/
I hope that helps.
I created 2 dummy projects in my application and named them BAL and DAL. When I build them, they build successfully. If I add a reference to BAL to the DAL project, it added nicely. But while adding the DAL reference to the BAL project, I get the following error:
A reference to DAL could not be added. Adding this project as a reference would cause a circular dependency.
Can anyone help me to solve this error?
Here's what you need to do:
Right click on the DAL Project in the solution explorer and select Project dependencies in the context menu.
You will now see a window that shows the project dependencies of the DAL Project. Make sure that BAL isn't checked.
Now you should be able to add your reference...
I hope this helps I've tried to keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.
Explanation:
Your DAL should not be able to access the BAL. Your code reference dependencies should be like this:
MVC project -> BAL -> DAL
The MVC project should reference the BAL, the BAL should reference the DAL. Set up your project like this. Make it work and then you will better understand why this setup is better.
Given:
Data = raw numbers and strings
Information = processed data into something meaningful
Cosider the following:
The UI should get its information from the BAL which could be able to compose it's data based on the DAL.
You can only reference in one way otherwise you get the error like you said. Just do this: delete the reference from your DAL to your BL and make a new one from your BL to your DAL!
It is implicit in the concept of "layers" that higher layers depend on lower ones, and not the other way round. If 2 "layers" are mutually dependent, then one is not higher than the other, they are not layers in any meaningful sense, and so can be considered to be in the same layer. The same basic principle holds for architectural components or modules, as enforced by Studio for project dependencies. If you use this principle - think of your projects as design modules rather than e.g. just throwing everything into a single project - you will have well-structured codebase which will give you far less problems as it grows in size.
That would cause a circular dependency. What you perhaps want to do instead is have a main application project, which references the BAL, and then BAL referenes DAL.
Data access should not need to reference business logic.
This just happened to me. You have a circular dependency, i.e. two projects both referencing each other. You need to make one of them independent of the other. Takes some time and it happens so quick. One second I was happily coding along, and the next I had 45 errors like this. Just took some time but it makes your architecture/program structure better too, helping you sort out dependencies properly.
Occasionally, you have two different projects, each of which needs methods that the other has. In this case, you can either make a third project and move the shared code into there, or choose one of the two projects to put the shared code in.
This problem occurred to me when I was building a WPF application with several layers like repository interface layer, repository service layer, sql service layer, rest service layer and my main WPF UI layer.
I resolved this error. I noticed that some of the layers were
unnecessarily referencing other projects. I removed this unnecessary
reference.
Then I noticed that some of my service layer and repository layer
had my WPF UI project as reference(My StartUp project); this is
what was creating circular reference. I removed this.
========================================================================
Conclusion: Check each projects reference dependency and make sure there are no unnecessary reference. Make sure sub layers are not referencing the startup project in the reference.
Hope I was helpful.
In my case I copied a project file without generating a new ProjectGuid. Since Visual Studio uniquely identifies projects using the ProjectGuid, it assumed the project was trying to reference itself.
in my case the project was somehow already declared in refrences in csproj.cs in the targeted project so simply i removed all the dependency in csproj.cs and tried to add from main project again and it worked
I had two projects called Application and Persistance that the reference of the Application project to the Persistance project encountered a circular dependency error.
By clicking on the Application project and looking at the values used inside it, you will notice that the Persistance project is include inside the <ItemGroup> tag, which is why you receive a Circular Dependency error.
To fix this error, just Comment this Include.
To get around this, add the reference by browsing to the projects DLL after it has been built. Do not select it from the "Projects" tab.
We are working on a very large VS project.
We want the project structure to "hint" developers on the logical components and design.
For this purpose, which is best:
One project with many subfolders and namespaces
Split to multiple projects based on logical grouping of classes. Have all projects in the same solution with solution folders.
Same as #2 but have multiple solutions instead of a single with subfolders.
My projects are huge.
We separate each "module" in different assemblies, creating Class Libraries. Something like this:
Client.ProjectName (Solution)
Client (Class Library)
- SectionHandler...
- ComponentModels...
- Utilities...
Client.Web (Class Library)
- Handelrs
- Extenders
Client.Net (Class Library)
- MailQueue
Client.Blog.WebControls.UI (Class Library)
- TopContent.ascx
- PostsList.ascx
Client.News.WebControls.UI (Class Library)
- TopContent.ascx
- PostsList.ascx
Client.Website
Each Class Library is a project under the solution Client.ProjectName or under some other shared solution.
The file system looks like this:
Client
|- Framework
|- Client
|- files...
|- Client.Web
|- files...
|- Client.Net
|- files...
|- SolutionName
|- Client.Blog.WebControls.UI
|- Client.News.WebControls.UI
|- Website
Shared client libs goes immediately under the Client\Framework folder, it is meant to be used on all projects for this client. Specific projects goes under the solution. We also have a folder called Company where we keep projects that can be used in any other project for any client, it is like the company framework.
The solutions we use:
One for the company framework
One for a client framework
One for each client solution
The same project can be referenced in multiple solutions, so you don't necessarily need to create all those solutions.
With this format we could use a lot of things on other projects simply referencing a DLL. Without this structure some projects wouldn't be possible in the given time.
Solutions are just containers for projects, so it's really the splitting of the projects that is in question.
I would recommend using a different project (AKA class library or assembly) for each major functional area. You may still want to use different namespaces within each project, but separating the major functional areas into different assemblies will make each assembly smaller. Therefore, if you need to use only one or two functions in an application, you only reference those two projects instead of the one massive project. This will make for smaller applications that compile faster and have less overhead.
In terms of solutions, you can organize those however you want because like I said, they are only containers. You may want to put them all in one solution...or maybe each in a separate solution...or maybe put related projects into solutions. Personally, I either use one solution, or for large projects, I use a "master" solution so I can easily compile everything in one shot and individual solutions so I can work on projects individually.
A project should be your "atom" of re-use. Or to put it another way, projects are the granularity of reusable code. It's OK to have interdependent projects but each project should be planned to be useful for its own functionality.
A solution is just whatever collection of projects you need for development / build / test. You could have multiple solutions that specify different subsets of projects.
Folders within a project may help but they could be an indication that your project is getting too large.
Solution folders likewise mean your solution is probably getting too large. Can you divide your codebase into multiple solutions, each with a meaningful and testable output artifact? Solutions can depend on (tested) artifacts from other solutions, just as they do on third party libraries etc.
You should also consider how VS and solutions projects map to the granularity of projects on your version control schema and any branch/merge policies you have.
I have grown to prefer a single solution with subfolders for the key domains, and add the projects in those. It's easy to browse, and gives a rough idea to your devs as to what goes where.
Having multiple solutions is mostly useful if the integrations between the components in eigther solution is loose, so each team has its work solution, and tests against released components from the other teams' solution.