I have MANY small "Test Projects" where I put together just enough code to prove or disprove some idea I'm working on. Some time (sometimes several months) later, I need to use some of this code. It can take hours searching through poorly named folders to find the gem of code I'm looking for.
It's not enough to be worth a Blog or wiki entry. I'd just like to have something that includes a description, maybe a screen shot and the zip file of the project (or pointer to version control)
Is there a feature I'm missing in Visual Studio to track projects? Is there a template that can be used to search based on project comments etc?
Has anyone come across something like this?
How long before this question gets closed?
Yes, there is such a feature: it's in the "New Project" dialog, and it is called "Name". This will allow you to give your project a meaningful name, that will aid in your finding it later.
There's a related feature, borrowed from the operating system, called "Folders". This allows you to group various projects that are conceptually related, and put them together into a "folder", which you can give a meaningful name related to the conceptual grouping.
The combination of these two will serve all of your needs. The trick is to avoid the mentality which leads to "poorly named folders". Good working habits will save an absurd amount of time in the future, and it really doesn't take that much longer to come up with a meaningful name, rather than TestProject426
Why not use a version control system (like subversion) for that purpose?
You can put your test projects under version control, and by using a log message you have something you can later search for keywords and check out a project in case you need it again.
Once you have put a project under version control, you can remove it from your local disk (so you have less stuff lying around).
If a wiki is really to much hassle, why not search the root of your project folders with something like
findstr /I /S "nifty comment" *.cs
This would just require you to leave a comment with some keywords inside your code.
Related
I've been writing bots that run on a platform I do not have control over. Essentially, I can upload a single file, and it only has access to basic JS and the site runtime. I chose to actually develop in TypeScript and transpile, to make things easier (imo). Since the initial bot was written for an individual, I've been asked for a few other customized variants. I do not mind this as there is very little in the bots that need to be changed per person. I have been hardlinking the common files between the projects, so as to not have to update in multiple places. This is, without a doubt, a bad solution. I am developing this in Visual Studio 2015, although I also have Visual Studio Code available, if anyone knows of a better build method. I am not very familiar with either, however. I would prefer being able to keep the common files in one project, and import them as dependencies. Maybe I missed something obvious, but attempting the same as I would do for C# did not seem to work.
From the way you are describing things, it sounds like you need to use some sort of custom build.
I would keep each of your bots in the same project and make sure that they share code appropriately, and then after tsc transpiles your files, concatenate them for each bot. So, each bot will get the files that it needs all stuffed into a single, gargantuan file.
You will need to do some trickiness, like parsing import/require statements, or include some kind of directives in each file that describes what other files are needed.
This doesn't sound too tricky to do and is the approach that I would take given the problem description you have provided.
As it turns out, you can declare a tsconfig.json file, and in there, specify things like included directories and specific files. This wound up being exactly what I needed, and was remarkably easy to set up. I've been updated the apps/bots for a while now using this system, and all the common files are effortlessly "shared" between then, with only recompilation necessary.
Does it use modification timestamp or/and does it check whether the actual content has changed (e.g. by comparing the checksum)?
Edit: I need to know this since I use Git for source control and often change branches. It appears that sometimes even if I change the branch back and force (e.g. from develop to master and then back to develop), the VS rebuilds half of the sources files. I wonder why this happens and why does it happen sometimes and does not happen the other times.
Since Visual Studio is a closed-source project, I bet only developers would be able to give a definite answer on how exactly does it work. However, for my purposes it is enough to test some scenarios.
I have tested it with a small solution and a couple of files in it (one header and two source files). Test results bring to the following conclusion. Visual Studio looks for modification date and time. Even if the file content is the same - it compiles this file and also any other files that include it. If the modification date and time are the same - it won't recompile it even if the content is different. Visual Studio ignores creation and access dates and times.
I'm guessing it uses FileSystemWatcher on the project directories and linked files (if any), just because it's the right way to do this kind of thing.
Some googling finds for more about this class (or just look it up yourself):
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/use-the-net-filesystemwatcher-object-to-monitor-directory-changes-in-c/6165137
http://www.dotnetperls.com/filesystemwatcher
Of course when the source file is open, it's content by the time of editing, as wel as any user changes (even not saved) are loaded in the RAM, but it doesn't compare it to disk content (that'd be too slow), it listens to a system event when the system tells it the file changed.
Update:
Probably not that class itslf, but the Win32 version of it, you know most of the system related .NET functionality classes are just Win32 wrappers.
From this StackOverflow answer: How does FileSystemWatcher work on another computers directory?
I think it wraps this API (not sure): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365465.aspx
Update 2:
This is Microsoft's approach to monitor file changes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/chzww271(v=vs.80).aspx
Update 3
This is an old answer, and it was mentioned above that it was a guess, as Visual Studio is closed source as mentioned in other answers. It's worth mentioning that the accepted answer suggests Visual Studio looks for file modification dates instead, which suggests it doesn't use the approach guessed in this very answer, and that it was wrong.
I hope the reader didn't mind the effort given to rationalize possibilities in this answer (causing reader discomfort or down votes). Keeping it for archival reason only.
In most .NET project I can use folder to organise the code files. In C++, I can't, but filters end up playing the same role. However, in F# with Visual Studio 2010, I can't. Every code file is shown directly in the project dir. Why is this feature not available?
And what is the optimal strategy for organizing a project with a lot of files?
Actually, you can add folders to F# projects but it's not supported directly through Visual Studio (you have to edit the project file yourself): http://fsprojectextender.codeplex.com/ (edit: old link was broken, updated to F# Project Extender home page which has links to the original blog posts which were moved) (which I found in this answer).
I do this myself, but it is cumbersome and you end up avoiding it until keeping sanity really demands it. I think the feature simply slipped, or perhaps there wasn't as much a culture for folder organization with the F# designers in the first place. You can see in the F# source code that they favor huge source files with no directories, with separate projects as an organization boundary.
I imagine the F# project template could be modified to support this, and it is certainly something I'd like to see happen. At the same time the linear compilation order F# enforces causes your code to be somewhat self-organized, and so folder grouping plays a less significant role.
Manually editing the .fsproj file as described in Stephen's answer is one option (and I used it when I wanted to organize one larger project).
However, you have to be a bit careful and I think you cannot add new files to the folders (creating a file by hand and then adding an existing file works). However, if you like to keep things organized (like I do), then it should work for you.
Additionally, there is also a tool called F# Project Extender that should make things a bit easier for you . I have not tried it yet, but it looks like it supports adding folders (and perhaps other useful things). See for example this blog post by the project author.
I'm interesting with statistic and motivation of using task list in VS. Why are you use it or not? Some people i asked even want a tool, that can synchronize VS ToDo with Outlook. What do you think?
IMO you can use Todos for:
Remember that you must do something like "Todo: implement this interface"
To mark a line/block of code as instruction for another coder if your are code in a team like "Todo: you can use foo instead of bar because ..."
If you review your code you can mark any code that he can be improved like "Todo: use Linq instead of foreach"
You can replace the default tasklist-window from visual studio with plugins:
Tasklist replacement for Visual Studio
http://genne-develop.com/
I used TODO for two purposes:
To mark enhancements that can be
done at a later stage. So whenever,
there is slack time, you can pick
one of them out of your pending TODO
list.
Things that are still need to be done while I am coding - so that I can re-visit those places and fix them. This is something like bookmarks except they are visible to other folks even if I forgot to fix them.
I use TODO comment syntax - it's there in code and not in .suo file as mentioned by Benjol.
I use TODO sparingly - only when I have something that I'm not the master of (something another team-member is working on etc.). I treat it as I treat bugs - max 5 at any time.
If I need scaffolding - I create temporary classes with Fake as a prefix in the class-name.
I guess, I don't want my production code to also act as my scrum-board/task-list.
One thing to be wary of about Task Lists in VS is that they are stored in the .suo file, which (I believe) most people tend to exclude from source control.
I'm working on a project which makes substantial use of code generation. Some of the files it generates contain >0.25 million lines of code. VS (2K5) doesn't cope too badly, but R# (4.01) throws an out of memory exception every two minutes or so.
Splitting them out into partial classes/separate files isn't an option in the immediate term, though it may be later.
Are there any clever IDE tricks to dealing with this?
EDIT: so people are immediately saying (very sensibly) 'don't have a file that big' and suggesting ways to break it out into smaller files.
That's fine, but I'm on a time-boxed task taking a look around and deciding what to optimise. My problem is very specifically 'how to view an insanely big file in an IDE without pain', not 'how to refactor the project'. For purposes of the question please imagine the file is read-only. :)
I would at least change huge files extention to something like .cpp_gen or .cpp_huge to remove syntax highlighting, outlining etc. and then reassign build tool back to C/C++ compiler tool for them.
Seems like this R# tool (is that Resharper?) is the problem. Can you disable it?
Otherwise, changing the file type for the generated code might make sense - presumably, you aren't going to be doing major editing on those files, so losing syntax coloring and other features specific to source files wouldn't be an issue.
WOW!
250 000 lines of code?
you should think not in a machine point of view, but in a human been point of view. Let's say that you want to pass that code to someone else, can you see the time to see what the code does?
Design Patterns were made to deal with this ind stuff, try to start small, refactoring it, then go deeper and start applying more D.P.
you will have less and less lines of code, and Yes, one of the best tricks is to separate into several files according to it's propose.
Assuming you're not hand-editing your generated code. (=BAD IDEA!!)
You could put the generated files in a separate solution that you compile from the command line and then reference those dll's from the project you're working in.
Is the problem when you open the file for editing in Visual Studio? I've noticed that VS editor can be quite slow and inefficient on large files. Also, you could try turning off certain options, e.g. word-wrapping kills my machine for some reason.
Otherwise you could use something else like Textpad with syntax highlighting installed to edit the problematic large source file... not as nice, for sure.
Don't use visual studio. There is too much going on in VS.
Since the file is read only, you wont be using any IDE features (Intellisense, Refactoring tools, formatting).
You will probably get better performance using a simpler application, such as notepad++ for simply viewing the file. Notepad++ will do standard language highlighting if you like color.
Can't you break up the files and use the preprocessor to bring them back together when you compile?
It must be possible somehow to group large chunks of those files in separate libraries. You'd then separate them into several projects. Tried this? What the is the current structure of your source code/ project?