Visual Studio with a Remote Server - visual-studio

The site that I am working on is at a remote server. I want to work on it locally. Are there any tools better then that in Visual Studio for working with a remote website?

Rather than deal with the quirkiness of VS remoting, what about using Remote Desktop to drive VS on a machine local to your target (behind VPN for example)?

If you can set up a subversion server on the remote site you could use that to sync changes between locations. This would be really helpful in other areas as well such as allowing multiple people to mess with your code and to keep track of every change you make. It would also be the best in the area of performance.
If its a windows share, just set up the repository where it is right now then use:
svn checkout file:///project/trunk
Or if its over a web server you can set up SVN to be served though that as well.
There are plenty of free/not free plugins for VS that make working with SVN very easy.

Related

Can't edit the TFS buid definition through the VPN

I am an administrator on TFS. If I am in the office (connected to the domain directly) I can change the build definition easily, but when I use VPN it says "Downloading Custom Assemblies" and never finishes downloading. What is the problem with that? Does anybody encounter this issue?
Is it the same machine? If not make sure you have upgraded VS 2013 to at least update 2, I've seen this problem with vanilla VS 2013 installations.
If it is the same machine you could try adding the URL for the TFS server to the trusted sites in your internet options.
If that doesn't work then it's probably a proxy server preventing the download of binary files. You need to speak to your network team and ask them for some help

How do i share my asp.net code with my team without using a server?

I'm working on asp.net project using VS2010.
I want to share my project code with one of my team member who is at some other geographical location but as we don't have a server we are not able to use TFS.
Can anyone tell me how can I share my code?
Or somehow can I use TFS on my local machine (or any other VS extension) and share it with him?
So that by using internet we can share our code with each other with help of any tool like TFS?
I would however recommend that you use TFS Preview to achieve this as it is free and provided all of the same goodies as having a local server without the need to run even a local server.
However if you must have local storage you can use TFS Express. It is free and will run just fine on your local computer. All you then need to do is expose your computer over HTTP and you are good to go.
Have you considered using distributed version control such as Mercurial? I do not know whether these systems can run serverless, nor do I have personal experience using them, but I've heard good things about the concept.

Source Server support on VMs with VMWare Lab Manager and TFS?

My company is interested in better integrating our investment in VMWare with our TFS deployment. Currently the company is running TFS2005 SP1, VS2010, and we have a sizeable SAN that we would like to use in environment reproduction similar to what is offered in TFS2010 Lab Management.
Of the features offered by TFS2005, we are currently leveraging only TF Version Control--work items and build automation are handled by separate systems. However, we would like to use the TFS-integrated Symbol/Source server in order to accurately debug the different versions of our product, and that's where we're running into difficulty.
The VMs deployed in VMWare are not joined to the corporate domain, and this means that we run into difficulty when attemping to grab source code information via Source Server and the "tf.exe view" command.
If devenv is run on the VM, it can't authenticate a domain account, and tf.exe view fails when grabbing source info.
If devenv is run on the developer desktop and debugging is done with remote debugger, the vm's local user account fails to access the share exposed by Symbol Server and can't load symbols to begin with, much less retrieve source.
Has anyone done this before?
Yes - You can still do this. If you are using Windows 7 (and I believe Windows Vista) you can always add the domain credentials to the "Credentials Manager" in the Control Panel. This will help it authenticate for the TFS URL whenever it needs to talk to TFS.
BTW, I have a blog post discussing the Symbol Server and Source Server features of TFS 2010 available here: http://bit.ly/SymbolServerTFS

Are there any SCM solutions designed for use on the local machine only?

I'm going to be building some ASP.Net MVC 2 software using Visual Studio 2010 and, as the only developer, I'd like to have some basic SCM in place to I can manage changes locally. I know most SCM solutions are designed to run on servers and accessed by multiple developers. What's an easy, simple SCM solution for a solo developer that wants to manage everything on a single Windows 7 machine?
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
A distributed VCS like git or mercurial would work just fine for a local repository, and you could always use your local repo as a master for future shared access.
File based SVN
git
I see three possibilities:
use a VCS that allows file-based access (SVN does)
install a server (e.g. for SVN)
use a distributed VCS (like Hq, git etc.)
They are listed with increasing recommendation level, so I recommend last one most. (Although I should warn against using git, which isn't really considered the easiest to use of the family.)
In my experience, TFS, hands down, has the best integration with Visual Studio. All other source control providers offer lackluster support for .NET projects at best (this specifically comes into play with renaming, moving, and deleting files under source control).
That said, for a single developer, my recommendation would be to use AnkhSVN with free SVN hosting on projectlocker.
On the other hand, if you have a BizSpark or MSDN account, and have some time, you may want to set up TFS 2010, perhaps on a VM.
Perforce provide a 2-user non-expiring "evaluation" license. I believe this can be installed and used on a single PC.
If you already have the .NET stack installed on your machine and SQL Server (including Express Edition), you can have a single user version of SourceGear Vault for free. Works well on my fairly old XP Pro machine.

Best way to deploy subversion (SVN) in a multisite windows environment

We are planning on moving for MS Source Safe (ouch) to SVN. We are working mostly in a Microsoft environment (windows, Visual Studio, .NET) and we have developers in multiple sites. I heard about VisualSVN and integration with visual studio. On the other hand I can get someone to host SVN for me and use TortoiseSVN. Any recommendations? Any pitfalls I should avoid?
I heard about VisualSVN and
integration with visual studio
Point to note, VisualSVN (the one that integrates with VStudio) is not a server technology at all, it is simply a integrated GUI front end to SVN, and in fact works through TortoiseSVN (which is required to be installed). However, VisualSVN is GREAT and defnitely worth the $50 per developer to use it. I used it daily and it saves me SO much time.
There is also VisualSVN Server, which will take care of the server side of things and the setup is absolutely dead simple. As long as you have an internet facing server and copious amounts of bandwidth (though SVN is not much of a bandwidth hog) you should be fine to host it yourself. Oh yeah, and VisualSVN Server is completely FREE!
However, having your repository hosted off-site is definitely always an option.
I use dreamhost for this now and couldn't be happier.
Hosting subversion is fantastically simple. At the risk of being labeled a brown nose (is there a badge for that?) Jeff Atwood did put up an article on installing subersion
http://blog.codinghorror.com/setting-up-subversion-on-windows/
So really you could save yourself some money by running your own subversion server and you'll never have to worry about what happens to your code if your hosting company goes belly up.
I would start with tortoise because it is free and is really easy to use. If you find you really need integration with VS then by all means try out visual svn. In my experience source control <-> editor integration is most useful for automatically opening files when you edit them. Subversion doesn't require you to open files so that big advantage is gone.
Another SVN integration with Visual studio is AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/ It is free, and has a few quirks. Personally, I use it for basic diffing and the visual indicators for file status (changed, conflict, etc.) while I use Tortoise for the heavy lifting.
You can get hosting of secure svn repositories from a variety of sources: http://beanstalkapp.com/ and many others. Often free if the usage (users, data, etc.) is limited.
VisualSVN does integrate with Visual Studio but not like SourceSafe does (and I mean this in a good way). It requires TortoiseSVN so it's not not an either/or. VisualSVN and Tortoise is a great combination.
Best way to deploy subversion (SVN) in a multisite windows environment
As far as I understand, you have multiple development teams in different locations (even different continents, maybe) who have to access the same codebase. For such a case VisualSVN Server provides Multisite Repository Replication feature.
The feature is based on VDFS (VisualSVN Distributed File System) technology which allows automatic, transparent, bidirectional master/slave replication of your repositories between remote sites. What's more -- it works out-of-the-box with minimal configuration steps done via VisualSVN Server Manager MMC console.
Learn more at http://www.visualsvn.com/support/topic/00068/

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