In an earlier question, I've found out that sadly Solution Folders are not real folders inside a directory.
I wonder if there is an AddOn or Macro that adds this functionality? i.e. when I create a Solution Folder, it created a real folder. When I Create a new Item (Right Click => Add => New Item) it automatically moves them into that folder, removing causes it to delete it from disk (after asking) etc.
This is for Visual Studio 2005, although we might upgrade to 2008 in a few months.
As of now, this doesn't seem to be possible in either VS 2005, 2008 and 2010 and there is no AddIn for this.
I too thought it was a strange idea. However it can be a useful tool to logically group projects in solutions without necessarily moving around folders in the file system.
I suspect you need this for revision control tool. In that case Look at AnkhSVN.
Maybe what you want is to add files to a solution folder as «links», i.e., keeping the files where they are but giving them a different organization inside the solution.
(when you add an existing file to a solution folder or to a normal project folder, if it is in a different corresponding physical folder, the file is copied).
It usually stays unnoticed, an option in the «Add > Existing Item ...» dialog where you can choose "Add As Link", instead of the "Add".
This allows to share files amongst projects, or, simply, organize them differently.
What I oftem miss is the possibility to add "virtual" folders inside a project, for organizational purposes, without breaking the namespace/folder best-practice.
Can't really get the point you want to add this function.
Sometimes you want to know if it can do this , however, the answer may be no. But it is not necessary means you can't achieve your original goal, there still a few ways to work around it without this.
Additionally, VS solution suppose to be the shortcut of your project settings and should not been included in any hard-code, the solutions may be various between the PCs and IDE envrionment.
I didn't really use VS2005 much, but have been using VS2008 for the past year.
It has a tick box for creating a solution folder when you create a new solution/project.
If you then use the "Solution Explorer" window you can create and manipulate folders and class files within them. This will actually create new directories that match.
Deletion of files from within the Solution Explorer will also delete the actual files from disk.
Related
first question I've asked so please go easy, also an absolute newbie with TFS (within Visual Studio 2010 in this context).
I have spent some time seeking an answer to this question both via SA and further afield, pretty shocked at how unintuitive this process seems to be given how fundamental it is. Slightly embarrassing.
In short: Three assets are shown in Source Control (three icons). I've now created three replacement icons via GIMP that I wish to use in the project, but I can't work out how to overwrite the old ones and put my new ones up.
I have read that I should 'check out' the existing three, which I have done, but I still can't then right-click on their containing folder in TFS and choose 'Add Items to Folder' - it complains that files with these names already exist with no option to overwrite.
edit - I don't have the ability to install any add-ons or other software on my machine :(
As you have discovered, TFS defines adding files as creating new files in source control. For files that exist in source control, you simply wish to edit them.
Once you have the files checked out, simply copy the files into place in Windows Explorer or from the command-line. You can then check the files in.
At my company, our software for one set of services is broken out into many different solutions containing any number of 350+ projects. My job at the company is to trace through all of this code to find where errors occur.
To facilitate this, I would like to have all of the projects contained within a single solution. I can do this via the 'Add Existing Project...' menu item, but it only allows me to add one project at a time. I also noticed that I can add existing items (multiple simultaneously) from Windows Explorer by dragging them onto a solution folder, but that doesn't import projects; it only adds the project file itself to the folder.
Is there a way to add multiple projects to a solution simultaneously? I realize that this may (read: will) take a long time.
I think you are looking for something like this:
http://nprove.codeplex.com/
This allows to load a a project or a folder with projects from the team foundation source control explorer into the current solution.
A solution would be to create a small program that takes as input the list of projects you want to add to your solution (or that scans a directory for *.csproj, *.vbproj...) and writes to the *.sln file of your solution.
If you open a *.sln file with notepad, you'll see there is no magic in it, it's just a text file that contains the list of projects (with their GUID) and some information about the build configuration.
Look at the structure of a solution file and try to write a piece of code that does the same as visual studio when user adds a project to the solution.
I'm pretty sure that can be automated with a small effort. Just a matter of file parsing.
Visual Studio Extension "Add Existing Projects" (Created by: Cyotek) allows you to add multiple projects to one solution by selecting all once. Worked perfectly for me on VS2017.
Basically, I want one of my folders to appear above the other folders as a type of "special folder", similar to how Properties has it's own special place even though it's a folder, same with App_Data, etc.
Is this possible?
By default, Visual Studio doesn't support adding special project folders. The Properties folder is hard-coded to behave the way that it does.
However, anything is possible with code. You could build an extension to do this, but it wouldn't be simple. You'd probably need to mess around with the IVsHierarchy or even implement a project subtype.
Basically, I want one of my folders to
appear above the other folders as a
type of "special folder", similar to
how Properties has it's own special
place even though it's a folder, same
with App_Data, etc.
Is this possible?
Yes:
Do it manually through the IDE
Write your own script to
generate/modify your *.sln/*.vcproj
For (1) "manual" on solutions in the IDE: Solution Explorer, right-click on Solution node==>Add==>New Solution Folder.
While typically the folders are sorted alphabetically (I'd insert a leading underscore to force your special folder to the top), solution folders inserted manually on my MSVS2008 leave the new folder "at the top", even though it should have bumped down when alphabetically sorted. However, folders under a Project (which are called "Filters") are always sorted alphabetically, and added similarly from the right-click, and then you can modify their "filter properties" with file name globs for what you want in there (e.g., add a filter glob for "*.MY_EXTENSION1;*.MY_EXTENSION2").
We chose (2), and we generate our own *.sln and *.vcproj, adding our own folders/filters. I've not seen any utilities on the web to help with that (so we had to write our own). The formats are not too hard to reverse engineer, but it's largely undocumented XML, so you have to experiment. There are only a couple good web articles explaining what's in the file, like this one:
http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/dotnet/excerpt/vshacks_chap1/index.html?page=4
On the "bright side", the files are only XML, so in developing our scripts we merely made changes through the IDE, saved, and compared the "diffs" for what change we want. Those changes are what our scripts insert when we modify our files. So, if you modify the file manually, you can similarly just "diff" the file to see what changed, and make your own script. (IMHO, this is the fastest and easiest route, since tools generally do not exist to manipulate these files.)
Tools like CMake and QMake generate *.vcproj/*.sln, but don't really do the folder customization thing like you're talking. However, we look at their output too, because, "there's more than one way to do things" in these files, and the files seem to have many undocumented features for doing different clever things that somehow these tools have "discovered" (so you can try to copy their generated output).
We found the .NET APIs to work with these files as too much work, and not really designed for that type of manipulation, but YMMV.
VS 2012 has a feature that I just found, and it solved this problem for me. It may not be new to VS.
Create a folder under the project with a leading "_" (to get it sorted first).
On the folder's properties set "Namespace Provider" to false.
VS (or ReSharper?) code analysis then does not complain that "the namespace does not match file location", which was the source of irritation for me that would otherwise have kept me from going this route.
Although there is no easy way to add Custom Folder, there is an easy way to "steal" Properties custom folder.
Add a regular folder to the project. For example MyCustomerFolder.
Open proj file xml. Find line
<AppDesignerFolder>Properties</AppDesignerFolder>
replace with
<AppDesignerFolder>MyCustomFolder</AppDesignerFolder>
Reload the project.
Now you've got a custom folder, that will always stick to the top.
I have a solution with many many projects, I did not write this project but it's an open source project (mysql++) , I need to include an include path to all projects. I would like to just globally add this include path to the solution and have it cascade down to all the projects... is this possible? I dread thinking about having to do the same thing for each individual project.
Thank you,
Alessandro Ferrucci
Visual Studio lets you modify many projects at once. Simply click the first in the Solution Explorer, shift-click the last, and right-click the group to get to the project properties. Now any changes you make affect all projects you selected.
Don't do this if individual projects have different include path settings and they must continue to have different settings. Changing the include path in this way will make them all the same. This may be fine even if they currently have different settings if you can agree on a path that makes sense for all the projects.
If each project has to have a different include path, the best way I know to do what you want is to open all the project files in a plain text editor, search for AdditionalIncludeDirectories, and paste the MySQL++ include directory plus a semicolon into the string that follows. Be sure to do this for all places that attribute appears in each project. At minimum, there will be two: one each for Release and Debug builds.
EDIT: If you use a good text editor, this can be a lot faster than doing the same operation inside Visual Studio. I recommend Vim, if you already have vi skills. Its . command to repeat the previous edit makes the "search, navigate, change" cycle much faster.
I've got a collection of HTML documentation that I'd like to add to my solution in Visual Studio. It's just a collection of files -- there are no build steps.
What's the best way to add this to my solution? In the past I've used a C# class library project and disabled it in Build Configuration, but this felt wrong.
A "Makefile project" doesn't work, because it doesn't support nested folders.
I don't really want to use Solution Folders, because they're not real filesystem folders. This makes them harder to work with. Solution Folders are great when your solution has a large number of projects in it, but I don't think they're great for managing more than a couple of loose files.
How do others do this?
You can put them in solution folder
Right click on solution and select Add->Add existing item - it will create solution folder automatically. You can add solution folder manually via Add->New solution folder
I would recommend simply adding them directly under the solution (or rather under a Documentation folder under the solution). The context menu for the solution title in Solution Explorer gives options to create solution folders and add references to solution files.
Given that you don't want to use solution folders, I see absolutely no point of including them in your solution then. Any method you could use would be rather contrived. It is quite common simply to have a Documentation folder in the root directory of your solution that is not referenced in any way by the solution/project files. (If you like, you can then mirror the directory structure of Documentation using Solution Files.)
I always put a .Documentation folder in each project that I am making the documentation for. It's not as elegant as having a single location for the solution, but it also makes it so that as I use different projects in different solutions and have the documents follow their projects. At compile time I have the build system put all the documentation together in one folder.