With Visual Studio (2008), is it possible to load a project (to a solution) that exists on a remote location ?
Basically what I want to do is somehow "host" a VS Project online and then load this project to a solution from a remote location. Is this possible in some way?
This is so that I can keep integrity when loading my Utils Library (used in tons of projects) and I don't want copies of my project in different projects and all having different versions etc...
I know that a possible solution is to have the Utils Library project hosted in SVN and then the folder would sync to it directly, but is there any other way to do this (ie, something more direct) ?
Yes, if you can map a network drive to it, the you can open the files from the location in visual studio.
you can map network drives to ftp servers by entering "ftp://your-ftp-server" in the path box.
Like others have said though, it's not really recommended. VS reads/writes a lot more than just to edit the main project files, it does all kinds of other stuff, so your network traffic be higher than you really want.
Or you could look at dropbox. It comes with a explorer addin that keeps your local PC in sync with the server.
My recommendation would be to use source control like subversion though.
It is possible, but not recommended (you'd be better using some form of source control, be it SVN, or a shared source provider like Codeplex (for open source projects) or TFS Preview (for closed source projects)
Is it not simpler just to have the compiled dll referenced in each solution? The way you are proposing is going to open you to changes to the project for one solution causing problems in a bunch of other solutions, that you might not immediately see.
Better to have a version of the Utils dll referenced in each sub solution and you can then update that dll when necessary, and test at the same time.
Related
I am new to TFS and I'm trying to add some custom library files that the whole team uses into Team explorer in Visual Studio. It's library files of Sahi Testing tool so that any changes made to the files can be seen on all machines. I have tried searching online but could not find exactly what I want. Help
Basically, you have the following options:
If you have Nuget Packages for the libraries, you do not necessarily have to add the packages to source control and restore them when you need them. See this link for details.
As an alternative, you can add libraries as binary files to source control so that each developer or build server can retrieve them together with the source code. It's a good practice, to add them to a special location so that they are located in one place and not spread over the solution. However, only use this approach for binaries that do not change too often. Otherwise, you might bloat your TFS database if the files are large and change very often.
I need to copy standard component DLLs into a standard folder defined in every VS2012 project when the project is opened. We're not allowed to store DLLs in Subversion so I need to reload this folder every time a developer opens the project/solution. I'm looking for an automation solution that will pull DLLs from a centralized location and copy them into the developer's solution. I looked at Visual Studio Extensions but it seems like an awful lot of work just to copy a couple of files. Are there any other hooks in VS2012 (and hopefully VS2010) where I can code simple PowerShell scripts to copy these files?
It turns out AntHillPro has it's own functionality for storing common DLLs and loading them into folders in your Solution before building. It's not as elegant as an MSBuild pre-build task but it fits in with the model followed by our Java builds with some slight tweaking.
Why you just do no use Nuget? Adding nuget reference and enable nuget restore on build will do exactly what you need. You can create nuget repository as shared folder.
I am the only developer for an application. All the files for this application are stored on the same computer and I am using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
The application has three solutions and these share common items such as some stylesheets, some javascript and shared views.
It's starting to become difficult when I change one file as I have to copy this to the other projects in the other solutions.
Is there a simple way that I could share files. Something that would help me be more productive. Possibly even some single user source code or a way of linking files between solutions.
Hope I can find someone to help me make my life easier.
Robert W
Even if you work on your own I would suggest some kind of Source Control System. Team Server is now free with Visual Studio or you can use open source tools. Like this you can link to source files in other projects and you can reuse your files.
Use Source Control! SVN is free so is TFS with Ultimate.
If its web based files (javscript, pictures, css, etc) use a virtual directory to point to the common code directories.
if its compiled code (C#,VB, etc) you can link the files. When adding an existing file in the dialog it will have a open button, with an arrow down. click the arrow down and "add as link" will be available. It will then use relative referencing to the other file. I use this technique for a SolutionAssemblyInfo.cs file.
I would recommend placing the common files in the same directory as the solution file or no more than 1 folder deep.
We are looking for a Version Control System to change our current Source Safe one. We are using it along with Visual Studio. We've failed so far - and the main reason for it is that all the alternatives we see doesn't support one or more features of VSS, especially one that we use widely - file share! What's up with that?
Alternatives like Source Gear claim to support them, but I gotta tell you that they do that very poorly. Not to mention that they are way slower than Source Safe, and have even more bugs.
What alternatives we do have to source version systems that do support file share? Or is there a reason to not use features like this? Please share your experience and support your comments.
EDIT:
By Share File I mean that I can checkout a file from any project that is sharing it, do some changes and then all get the latest version. It is very useful when working with C++ projects, or even C# Web Projects. I want to be able to share a file without the need to make another library for that.
From MSDN:
Sharing Files or Projects
Visual SourceSafe has a Share command that allows sharing of files or projects. For use of the command, see How to: Share an Item.
When you request file sharing, Visual SourceSafe creates a shared link between the versions of the file in the projects that share the file. When you check in the file to one of the projects, your changes are automatically checked in to all the sharing projects. All the projects that share a specific file are listed in the Links tab for the file.
When you share a Visual SourceSafe project, you create a completely new duplicate project under the current project. All the files in the new project are shared with the corresponding file copies in the shared project, and changes in one are reflected in the other during check-ins to the Visual SourceSafe database.
Other tools do have similar concepts, though not always with the same name or exactly the same semantics. Off the top of my head:
Subversion externals
MKS SI (shudder) calls them shared sub-projects
I tend to avoid them because it indicates there are some other issues with my project. If the resources are needed across many projects, I package them as a library and set my other projects to depend upon that artifact (using a dependency management tool such as Maven or Ivy to manage the dependencies)
In Subversion, you can share a whole folder (and its subfolders of course) with the svn:external property.
And since version 1.6 you can also share files.
In Git, those are called "submodules" - not sure if they work for single files though.
This post http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlee/archive/2006/07/20/sharing-files-in-team-foundation-server.aspx shows how you can accomplish the same thing with Visual Studio and TFS.
In StarTeam you can share files across projects.
I apologize if this is not really addressing the original question but depending on your will to "change mindset" for which version control system to use I would strongly suggest moving to a distributed one such as Mercurial or Git. There are plug-ins for Windows Explorer and Visual Studio for both.
As to specific features such as VSS-style file sharing I suggest setting up a Continous Integration environment like TeamCity and configure it appropriately.
It's a steep curve at first but awesome and time-efficient once your staff and servers know what to do.
I have two web projects, both these projects share client-side JavaScript currently residing as almost identical copies in both projects. I say almost because I'm clearly having versioning problems with these files.
I've managed to put the files in a solution folder and created links to them from my projects and this works when I publish the projects. However, when I run the WebDev server locally these files are not hard file system links? They seem to be maintained within the Visual Studio project as a reference only.
The problem is that the WebDev server will make a request to the presumable valid location of the file but it will not find it there because it doesn't exist as a physical file at that location.
Anyone know how to work around this?
If you use SVN, you could have the files managed as externals. Basically this will allow you to have the shared files maintained in one location, and have an external (physical file) reference to them.
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s03.html
Dave the Ninja
Here is a post that can help you :
Using Linked Files with Web Application Projects
http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamesdawson/archive/2008/06/03/using-linked-files-with-web-application-projects.aspx