I have a Visual Studio 2008 solution that contains several projects.
Most projects in this solution write a .dll when built.
My installer project in this solution copies these .dlls to a target application directory.
My uninstaller for this solution does not remove these .dlls, even though it should.
My installer doesn't overwrite old versions of existing .dlls, which causes my application not to function.
If I delete the existing .dlls prior to install, the application works well.
I've monkeyed with many many settings in the solution for these .dlls. Nothing seems to work.
I've added extra copy actions to the install project, in an attempt to overwrite existing .dlls. A couple of these extra copy actions can not be deleted, because the delete choice is disabled from the drop-down list when I right-click on them. Weirdly, the original detected dependencies can be deleted.
Any ideas are most welcome.
Thanks,
-Vince
Related
I have developed an opencv application using windows form and C#.
The opencv packages I got from the Nuget packages manager (EMGU.CV and ZedGraph).
Everything works fine in visual studio, but when I publish the project and install the program in my machine, it throws an exception when I click a button that performs some opencv operations.
I guess the opencv packages didn't come along with the final published project, so how do I do to make it export when publishing, I thought it would be an automated process, I have already used other nuget packages and I had no problem with it.
What Am I missing here?
After some days waiting for an answer, and looking for solutions, I've figured it out how to solve this issue.
I came across this question:The type initializer for 'Emgu.CV.CvInvoke' threw an exception
Which led me to this: http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Download_And_Installation#The_type_initializer_for_.27Emgu.CV.CvInvoke.27_threw_an_exception.
More precisely this part:
First of all, I don't know why the compilation runs fine inside visual studio enviroment and why not when publishing the project as it is. For some reason, the Nuget packges are not enough for publishing the project, you need to add the .dll files manually yourself (not sure why this occurs once I have worked with Nuget packages before and this workaround was not necessary).
To find the .dll files you go to your project directory, then you go to bin\Debug\x64 or bin\Debug\x86 (depends on which operating system you are targetting - 32 bits or 64 bits -in my case I added all .dll files from x86 folder, I guess you can add from both folders if in doubt).
The Debug folder of your project is build every time you run the project inside Visual Studio enviroment, so if your Debug folder is empty then you just need to run the project one time to be able to find the auto generated files inside that folder. Just a side note here, you can use either the Debug or the Release folder inside bin, just remember to check if you compiled the project in Debug mode for Debug folder, or Release mode for Release folder, otherwise the desired folder will be empty, as explained before, I found no differences between the files generated, I added the dll files from Debug\x86.
Once you have located the .dll files, you go to Visual Studio, right click on the project in the Solution Explorer tab, then Add ---> Existing Item.
Go to the folder where the .dll files are, select all and click Add.
Once you have done this, the .dll file will be shown in the Solution Explorer.
Right click on each .dll file added in the Solution Explorer, and open the properties tab by clicking Properties. On the Properties tab, go to option Copy to Directory and change the field to Copy Always (the emgu documentation link provided above states to use the option "Copy if newer", but to make sure I chose "Copy always", it worked fine for me). Repeat the process for all .dll files added.
Now you are ready to go for publishing the project as it is,just remember doing this every time before publishing your project to see if no .dll files are missing, so once you got to final version of your program, run it, and then make sure to check the .dll files, it might have new ones to add or to remove.
I'm using Visual Studio 2015 update 3 with TFS hosted at visualstudio.com.
When I add a C# class file to one of my projects in Visual Studio, it's not automatically added to source control. For other projects in the same solution, C# class files are added automatically, as expected.
When I then add the file, manually, in the project with this problem, I get the following question;
I have to confirm to add the file to source control.
There is a similar question (Visual Studio 2015 new files not being added to source control automatically), associated with a "release" branch, which is not the case here (at least I think so - our TFS-project has never been branched)
We've never configured any .tfignore manually.
This started to happen recently and occurs on all development machines, so it's probably not a client machine issue.
I'm clueless, so any help is highly appreciated.
UPDATE
I've discovered that the problem occurs in projects with names ending with ".Lib"
Projects:
Core (ok)
Core.Lib (files not added automatically)
Communication (Ok)
Communication.Lib (files not added automatically)
I tried to add a test project Test.Lib to my solution. This project was not added to TFS either, but project Test was.
The "lib" extension is the problem. Try renaming the project folder to something else, eg. "CoreLib".
To reproduce this behavior / bug, try the following:
Create a Test directory in a directory controlled by TFS
Create a Test.Lib subdirectory in this directory.
Add a file, test.cs, to Test.Lib. (Test\Test.Lib\test.cs)
In Visual Studio's Source Control Explorer, try adding the new Test directory to source control. You'll see test.cs on the "Excluded items" tab.
The "lib" extension is used by binary files, and these are ignored by Team Explorer by default. I haven't found an official list of filetypes anywhere, but other affected file types are dll, exe, obj and possibly others. You can include these files manually by right-clicking them and selecting "Include".
In order to use the latest version of resharper on the much-maligend (by me) project I'm currently maintaining, I copied all the source to a separate folder and opened the project in VS 2010.
It converted successfully, so said the conversion report (after informing me it seemed to be under version control but would be unbound since it was missing needed info for that, which I accepted). Yet, although the conversion was nominally successful, in the Solution explorer, beneath the project name, it says "Project Unloaded"
Now for the nitty-gritty: The project has two related solutions, a "regular" (.exe) and a library (.dll) project; they both display in Solution Explorer, but both say "Project Unloaded."
Now for the strange part: When I realized that I had not even copied over the files from the .dll project, I started over and created two separate folders for them (as they have in the development setup), and copied each one's file into each folder.
But now, when I attempt to open the .exe project (the one which had previously claimed it had been converted successfully) from this new location, by selecting File | Open Project and selecting the .sln file, I get, "\.csdproj' cannot be opened because its project type (.csdproj) is not supported by this version of the application.
To open it, please use a version that supports this type of project.*
The dev environment is VS2003 in a XP Mode virtual machine; I'm trying to open the projects now in VS2010 in Windows 7.
Is there a way I can get this project to open and compile in VS2010, so that I can resharperize it (and carry over some of those fixes, albeit manually, one at a time) to the "real live" version of the project?
The best way would be to create a new project in Visual Studio 2010, like you've done. That will create the project folder and any necessary settings.
Next, copy files from your old project to this new folder. As you copy a file into the new folder, also "Drag-N-Drop" that file into your Visual Studio Solution.
The Visual Studio conversion wizard is good from going from the last version to the next version up, but going from VS2003 to VS2010 could be too big of a jump for it.
If I had to guess, this conversion is bombing because your old project targets the .NET Framework 1.0 and VS2010 doesn't do 1.0.
You will likely have to rebuild your project and fix numerous little bugs due to changes in the Framework, but none should be major.
How can I make a solution in visual studio so that the .dll dependencies that reside in some other directory totally different from where the solution itself is affected by "get latest".
What I've tried is creating a Dependencies solution folder within the solution itself and added the dlls to it, that way they belong to the solution even though they don't belong to the directory structure of the solution.
So for example the .sln file is in:
D:\tfs\repository\main\SolutionA\solution.sln
and the dlls are in:
d:\tfs\repository\main\SolutionX\Dependencies\Binaries
What I really want to achieve is to have a foolproof way to build the solution, including the following scenario:
1- Have a brand new installation of windows, visual studio, etc.
2- open visual studio
3- find solution.sln on TFS, double click on it so that visual studio gets every project and files in the solution, and opens the solution
4- successfully build
What happens when I try the Dependencies solution folder approach and repeat the scenario above, it will get all the projects within the solution, opens it, but the dependencies solution contents won't be pulled from TFS (although Visual Studio shows them on Solution explorer), which I think is flawed.
Some suggestions that don't involve creating pre/post build scripts are appreciated.
When you attempt to open a solution for the first time using the TFS Source Control Explorer, you may find that not all of your dependencies will be retrieved - the squiggly line may be highlighting some of your missing References.
One work around is to...
SOLUTION SETUP
Checkout all of your source code from TFS (i.e. Main and all of the sub-directories)
Open your solution in Visual Studio (i.e. MyApplication.sln)
In the solution explorer, create a New Solution Folder called ThirdPartyDll, and then add the appropriate assembly references (i.e. Assembly1.dll, Assembly2.dll,...)
Check-in your solution to TFS
SAMPLE FILE STRUCTURE
Main
MyApplication.sln
Source
MyProjectA
MyProjectA.csproj
MyProjectB
MyProjectB.csproj
Dependencies
Assembly1.dll
Assembly2.dll
You've run into a limitation of the "Open from Source Control" functionality. If you added the solution to source control from Visual Studio you should have seen the following message:
"The project that you are attempting to add to source control may cause other source control users to have difficulty opening this solution or getting newer versions of it. To avoid this problem, add the project from a location below the binding root of the other source controlled projects in the solution."
Open from Source Control will create a workspace mapping for the solutions root directory (D:\tfs\repository\main\SolutionA) but not a separate one for the SolutionX folder which is a peer to SolutionA. On the "new" machine you will need to manually create a workspace mapping to d:\tfs\repository\main in order to get both the SolutionA and SolutionX folder.
Create a solution folder and add the dependencies to it, that way when VS gets latest for the solution it will download these files. A bit brittle as people will need to maintain that folder but it works.
Alternatively create a nuget package and use restore packages on build. It will require a couple of extra steps when you create a new developer box (your nuget package repo will need to be added) but it will work for all projects going forward and is less brittle than the solution folder method.
I have a Windows Forms application with an installer (.msi) already created with Visual Studio. I am now creating a new installer for version 2.0 with the property RemovePreviousVersions set to true.
Now, when I install 2.0 over 1.0 it removes 1.0 and installs 2.0 completely.
Is there a way that I can tell the installer if you find some files already installed (like .xml files used for data) then don't override them?
I am trying to have my 2.0 installer serve the 2 purposes:
Install from scratch for new users
Existing users will upgrade but not lose their customizations
The deployment project in VS does not overwrite files. What happens is that since you have RemovePreviousVersions set to true, when you change your program file version and the ProductCode GUID of the setup project, it will first uninstall the previous version and then will do a clean install of the new version.
To make sure some files don't get overwritten, I usually exclude them from the Content or Primary output files (wherever they are located) and then add them separately to the setup project. Doing this, you can individually set properties for those files. The property you are looking for is called Permanent" that if set to true will never uninstall the file in question, and therefore will never overwrite it with a new version. The only drawback with this is that when you uninstall the product, the Permanent files will not get removed from their target locations, but in my case (usually local DB files), that's a good thing ;)
Cheers!
[edit] The above is true for VS 2008 SP1. Haven't tried it on other versions, so hopefully you are using the same VS version or it works for the version you use.
[edit2] Oh, also you could also use the "Condition" property to achieve something similar. If you do that, make sure that "Transitive" is set to True so the Condition is always evaluated. Haven't tried it with Conditions, but that's another option you could look at. Other than these 2, I think that's pretty much it for VS deployment projects.
When I was in a similar situation what I did was:
The files that were customized by each user and should NOT be touched by the installer were NOT included in the MSI (NOT in the Visual Studio Setup Project). When the app was run for the first time I generated the XML files through the code.
The files that were static (e.g. data that was used to populate Dropdownlists) I included in the MSI and I can update those by building a new MSI with Visual Studio.
Basically don't include customizable files in your MSI project. Create them in code for new users.
I never looked into telling the MSI not to update certain files that are included in the MSI file. The solution I came up with was perfect for me. I don't know if it can be done.
I hope this helps.