Is there a way to use add-as-link when dragging and dropping source files or entire source trees into a C# project?
Currently, dragging a tree of source files onto a C# project will cause Visual Studio to copy all files to mirror tree below my solution file.
This can be avoided with the the add-as-link option as depicted in the picture below. However, it gets tedious for large trees or when some files in a directory are already part of the project.
Screenshot of the add-as-link functionality in Visual Studio http://jaapsuter.com/images/add_cs_file.jpg
I've looked in Tools->Options, searched the web, and held various magic key combinations when dragging and dropping, to no avail.
I'm tempted to write a script that just globs my .cs files and runs a regular expression over my .csproj file. I'm aware of NAnt, Premake, and other solutions - but I'd like something lightweight.
Although this question has been answered, I thought I'd provide another way, because I found this question while figuring out if it was possible to add linked files in Visual Studio using drag-drop, rather than the cumbersome Add Items dialog box. And while the answer here wasn't what I was looking for, I found out myself:
Holding down CTRL+SHIFT down while drag-dropping, will create linked files. Additionally holding down only CTRL will create copies, but not remove the source file.
What you can also do if you don't find a solution is bind a directory to your project by hand once and let the project find all .cs files in that directory automatically when it loads.
This is easily done by changing your MSBuild file in the following way:
<ItemGroup>
<Compile Include="SomeDirectory\**\*.cs"/>
</ItemGroup>
This will take all .cs files in SomeDirectory and include them to the project. This is very useful if there are often a lot of files added to the project. However, it may break on some machine adding useless files. That's why I would only recommend that on an external project that's not editable in your current workspace.
Probably not what you're asking for, but once I had two .NET applications which I wanted to share a lot of source files and so I placed both Visual Studio solutions in the same directory! It actually works, although I guess that a lot can be said about this approach...
Otherwise the most beautiful way to share code is by placing the shared code in a separate assembly, although this requires quite a bit of extra work if it is not written like that in the first place.
Related
I have read this post thoroughly: How does Visual Studio's source control integration work with Perforce? and found it very informative. However, I have a specific issue that is blocking my use of Perforce in VS.
For the most part, I have no complaints about the plug-in (I'm still using the P4VSCC plug-in because the new plug-in requires conversion by the entire team which can't happen at this time). Once I understood the idiosyncracies, I've had only one problem working with the plug-in.
Our solutions contains many projects that are built into a single deployment package. As such, each assembly is versioned the same. To accomodate this, and other common aspects, we have defined a common "SharedVersionInfo.cs" file which contains the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes typically found in the AssemblyInfo.cs file. This file is stored in an Assets folder beneath the solution folder and added to each project's Properties folder as a linked file. This works great from a version management perspective as we only have to change the version in one place and all assemblies are updated. However, Perforce has a problem with this when a new developer first opens the solution or when a new project is added. The only remedy we have currently is to remove all of the linked files (there are 3 per project in this solution), bind the project to source control, then re-add the linked files.
This isn't such a big deal when we add a new project but the solution contains 80 projects (and counting), so this isn't a viable remedy for a new developer!
My understanding is that the problem has to do with where VS thinks the binding root for each project is. After some research, I was led to find where the MSSCCPRJ.SCC files are for the projects. I found there are numerous SCC files scattered throughout the solution structure. So...
First question: Why are there multiple MSSCCPRJ.SCC files in my solution structure?
We also have several shared/common projects that we use in our solutions. This leads to the following folder structure:
/Source
/CommonTools
/ProjectA
ProjectA.csproj
/ProjectB
ProjectB.csproj
/MySolution
/Assets
SharedVersionInfo.cs
/Project1
Project1.csproj
/Project2
Project2.csproj
:
/ProjectZ
ProjectZ.csproj
MySolution.sln
Where both ProjectA and ProjectB are part of MySolution.sln
Second Question: How can I setup the bindings so the /Source folder is considered the root? This would ensure that all projects included in the solution are under the same binding root. Perforce considers this folder to be the root, how do I get VS and the plug-in to do the same?
Since no one else has offered up a solution, I thought I'd follow-up with my own findings for anyone else that comes across the thread.
First, I still have no idea why Visual Studio creates multiple MSSCCPRJ.SCC files but these are the key to establishing the "binding root" for a solution. It is critical that this file exist at the highest level necessary so that ALL of the projects in the solution are in sub-folders relative to the location of this file. In my example above, the MSSCCPRJ.SCC needed to be located in the /Source folder. Having it in the /MySolution folder caused the original problem when adding projects from /CommonTools into the solution.
That said, resolving the issue was no easy task. I had to manually edit the .sln and all of the .csproj files in Notepad. What I found was that some of the .csproj files had the following elements identifying the source control settings:
<SccProjectName>SAK</SccProjectName>
<SccLocalPath>SAK</SccLocalPath>
<SccAuxPath>SAK</SccAuxPath>
<SccProvider>SAK</SccProvider>
I don't know what SAK stands for, but my understanding is this tells Visual Studio to use the binding information contained in the .sln file.
I had to change these to:
<SccProjectName>Perforce Project</SccProjectName>
<SccLocalPath>..\..</SccLocalPath>
<SccAuxPath />
<SccProvider>MSSCCI:Perforce SCM</SccProvider>
where the SccLocalPath value is the relative path from the .csproj file to the MSSCCPRJ.SCC file.
I also had to change the SccLocalPathX and SccProjectFilePathRelativizedFromConnectionX statements for each project in the .sln file. The SccLocalPathX value should be the relative path from the .sln file to the MSSCCPRJ.SCC file - a dot (.) if in the same folder. SccProjectFilePathRelativizedFromConnectionX should be the relative path from the binding root to the .csproj file.
I wish I could say that having that in place, I never had to repeat these steps. Unfortunately, I still have to go in and make corrections every time I added a new project to the solution. Visual Studio still wants to use SAK for the elements in the .csproj file and sometimes the values in the .sln file aren't quite right.
But, at least I know what to look for and what needs to be done to achieve my goals. If anyone else has a better solution or a way to configure VS and/or Perforce so these settings are created correctly up-front, I'll gladly give credit.
Hope that helps...
I need to include all the output from some of the programs projects in the installer... my question is similar to the one in this post: How to add a whole directory or project output to WiX package
However, I am afraid I don't really understand the answer given in this link. From all the reading I have done, I think I need to use Paraffin to do this. But is there a "start from the very beginning, how-to" resource for using paraffin?
I have read this page: http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2008/12/22/paraffin-3-0-now-with-full-wix-3-0-support.aspx
and one of the posts mentions calling paraffin from a bat file. Is this how one would "use paraffin" in their installer? If it makes a difference, I have been using Visual Studio to work on this project, and am also not sure how to use command line from within Visual Studio. Does anyone have any resources for a very new beginner? Thanks.
I ended up including each .dll and .exe manually, since they don't change very often. It was fairly easy to format them in this style:
`<File Id="WhateverId" Name="NameToDisplayAfterInstall" Source="$(var.ProjectName.TargetDir)Filename.ext" />`
I used Excel to format a list of files quickly and easily. I put all of these File tags in the <DirectoryRef Id="INSTALLLOCATION">
tag.
I did figure out how to scrape all the dlls and exes from the project output by using Heat (not paraffin) and harvesting a directory, not a project. Harvesting a project yields only the main exe and dlls. The problem with harvesting a directory, at least in my case, is that I ended up with a lot of excess files, (like .pdb and .xml) that I didn't want.
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.
I have two versions of a project. One for Silverlight and one for .NET. The SL project has the vast majority of the code base in it. I want to globally add all files from the SL project into the .NET version as linked files. I've managed to do so successfully like this in the csproj file for the .NET version:
<Compile Include="..\MyProj.Common.SL\**\*.cs" Exclude="..\MyProj.Common.SL\Properties\**">
Unfortunately, this adds all the files right to the root of my project... so I end up with a long unreadable list of linked files in the .NET project. I really really really don't want to have to maintain an entire duplicate directory structure by hand and deal with directory name changes and file name changes and whatnot.
So, is there any way to have Visual Studio preserve the directory structure when adding linked files in the wildcard manner above? Or is there at least a way of making it group all the linked files together under a directory in the .NET project like MyProj.Common.SL.Links?
The very closest I've come is to set the <Visible>false</Visible> under the <Compile> tag, which effectively removes the long unreadable list of 300+ files....but unfortunately this screws up Resharper, which no longer sees those files as valid and it goes crazy on all the projects that reference the .NET project. If I could figure out a way of making Resharper not get all messed up, that would be an acceptable solution too...
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
I think I found a way of getting this to work:
<Compile Include="..\MyProj.Common.SL\**\*.cs" Exclude="..\MyProj.Common.SL\Properties\**">
<Link>MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles\MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles</Link>
</Compile>
It will create a MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles folder and group all the linked files under that folder.
I think I would do this:
Copy the existing project's <Compile> items, which presumably have e.g. Include="foo.cs" and Include="Folder\bar.cs"
Paste them into the new project
Search and replace <Compile Include="(.*?)" /> with <Compile Include="..\Other\$1" ><Link>$1</Link></Compile>
I don't know if I got the regular expression search and replace syntax exactly right, but the point is, you already have a good project, you should be able to cut, paste, regex-replace it to get the same set of files, only referenced from a different folder, and with the same directory structure.
You'll still have two .csproj's to maintain at this point, but this is also easily fixed. Now take this new list of compile items, and put it in a file named e.g. "Common.csproj" that just contains the property group with those compile items, and then have both projects <Import Include="..\Common.csproj" /> and not include any Compile items of their own.
Basically, a little manual labor to refactor the .csproj file for sharing once, and then I think you'll be set. I am not sure if this is the 'easiest' way to unblock you, but I think this sounds approximately like what you may want for an 'ideal' structure.
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.