Over the years I have vacillated between having my project/source folders in a directory one level removed from the root (e.g. D:\Projects) and keeping them in the default location for Visual Studio.
In the past, I resisted storing anything in the various "My Documents" folders established by Win 95, Win 98, and XP. I finally switched to storing them in the Documents folder since Vista shortened the path and I got tired of changing default directories for my dev tools. However, now I find myself leaning toward creating a folder off root again since I am setting up a new machine.
I get tired of the long paths you have to navigate to when stuff is stored in the documents folders. Also, I don't backup source code and database files like I do with my other documents since I use a VCS for source code. However, it seems you are always fighting to maintain a "non-standard" source location since every dev tool generally wants to store stuff in a subfolder of documents.
I would like to hear other's opinions on this subject.
I think it depends on your use... I prefer to have my development projects on a separate drive/partition, so will usually use the following convention D:\projects\{company-name}\({client-name}|internal)\{project-name} Where the client-name comes into play is when the work is by a given company, but for another. I keep my projects under D:\projects\personal\... This allows for a better structure.
As to backup strategies, imho this is what source control is for. I prefer subversion, and have a backup strategy for the svn server. Although I didn't much care for ankh 1.x, the 2.x version, along with TortoiseSVN have worked pretty well for me. As a matter of practice, I tend to checkin often, and try to only checkin code in a runnable state (though new features/code may not work).
In clear violation of my Unix past I use c:\dev (for development) or whatever other drive I use for development. Note: It is advisable NOT to use the system partition for development as software development really fragments the disk.
I never had any reason to use another directory - except for some projects where "company standards" forced everybody to have the development directory on the root of the C: drive. (really! They had hardcoded paths to c:\whatever)
During development I sometimes check out multiple versions of the source to different directoies - if only to find out that the version committed into the version control system of the day really has every file checked in. (Sometimes I add a file to the development directory but forget to check it in.)
So I think it is rather irrelevant where your development directory is, as long as the path is typable for you (I prefer short paths) and does not contain white space for the usual reasons on windows (if you want to do some scripting).
I preferred location at another partition. Because projects have many and many small files and if you use SVN or other revision control system this files have very high fragmentation and slowing system if are storing at OS partition.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I guess you can put your projects in My Documents and use a symbolic link to the directory in your root folder. By doing that you can access your files both ways and solve problems like changing directory for tools. Info about symbolic links in Vista
If you’re the only one using your computer I don’t really see why you should put your code in the profile directory, backup should be done using a version control system anyway.
I store "active" projects on a secondary drive, one level from the root. It's much more easy to get quickly to that folder (even if VS2008 has this nice "Open Folder in windows explorer" now). It's also convenient for backups, format/reinstall, etc. The "less active" projects are stored on a NAS for quick reference. All are also stored on a remote SVN server that is backuped. (I'd also recommend not using # in folder for web application as it (sometimes) create strange errors from the development web server)
I use SUBST (run on startup) to map some random folder to a high-lettered drive. Then I can put my stuff anywhere, and move it around, and yet I always get to refer to it by Y: or Q: or whatever.
This is one of those extra layers of indirection that are said to solve every problem.
For personal projects I just put them on the desktop (although I do move the desktop to D:\Desktop). They are archived off to my documents when they become inactive.
For work I have all the projects in a C:\Sourcecode folder inside a dedicated development virtual machine.
Just one question, do your primarily develop desktop apps or web apps?
If you are constantly writing web apps, here's what works for me:
Create a folder: c:\dev or c:\sites (keep it simple)
Register the folder as a virtual directory in IIS
Create a different folder for each of your projects and create a web application in IIS for each of them
One advantage this setup might have is that, its easier for you to navigate your site in the browser, i.e less typing, easier to remember, standardization for all your other apps.
my 2cents.
it is better to keep your project in the other partition else than window and i think as i do
d:\projects\"some grouping of project own your own choice"\projectname
e.g.
d:\projects\UNIversty\admission
d:\projects\universry\examination
d:\projects\planners\ipp
Related
To start with some background, I am a member of a small team developing an ASP.NET application. In addition to us, there are 2 other teams working on it, all from different countries. Source code is hosted on a shared SVN server but there is no central testing environment. Each developer runs the app on their own machine and data services are set up per team.
Unfortunately our SVN workflow has some gaps in it: annoyances arise when there is time for an SVN update.
It is mainly because each developer and team have slightly different environments in terms of disk directory structure and configuration (both IIS and app itself). Hence conflicts in configuration files and elsewhere that in essence are not conflicts at all - for runtime configuration (XML) and in *.suo.
How should we handle this if our objective is to keep checkout, app setup and update as painless as possible?
One option would obviously be master copies. Another one establishing uniformity in developer environments and keeping it. But what about a third alternative?
One thing to do is to not put the .suo files into SVN, there's no reason to do that.
For IIS configuration there should be no argument - uniform environment across the build team.
For app.config files and the like, I tend to keep them in a separate "cfg" directory in the root of the project and use pre-build events to copy in the relevant ones I need depending on the project and environment I'm working on.
You could have a separate build task to copy in user-specific config into your output directory. Add a new directory in your root project called "user.config or something, and leave it empty. Then configure your project build to check this for entries and copy them to the output directory. This is easy to do, and then each dev can have their own config without affecting the master copies. Just make sure you have an ignore pattern on that folder so you don't commit user-specific configuration. If you have svnadmin access to your source code repo, you could set a hook to prevent it from ever happening.
Also set ignore patterns on your root directory (recursively) for .suo, .user, _Resharper or any other extensions you think are pertinent. There are some So questions already on exactly this topic:
Best general SVN Ignore Pattern?
Ignore *.suo and *.user files in svn. It is easy. After that create two types of config files in subversion. Development and Server, if in use add Test also. See below example.
ConnectionStringDevelopment.config
ConnectionStringServer.config
AppSettingsDevelopment.config
AppSettingsServer.config
Server files would contain server information. Development files is not contained in svn and ignored there. Every new developer will start by copying server files and making changes according to his environment.
Look following example site
http://code.google.com/p/karkas/source/browse/trunk/Karkas.Ornek/WebSite/web.config
following lines are interest.
<appSettings configSource="appSettingsDevelopment.config"/>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStringsDevelopment.config" />
ConfigSource can be used almost everywhere in web.config therefore you will be able to change every config to every developer. Only make use of following naming convention. ignore *Development.config in subversion. This way no developer config will be added to subversion.
Its not a perfect solution (and should only be used if there are not many of those special files), but what I do is to add fake files for each case, and switch the real file locally to it.
In detail: I have a file foo that creates the problem. I also create foo_1 and foo_2 and then locally switch foo to foo_1 (I use tortoisesvn, so I cant really give you the command line to do that). Then I am working on foo on my machine, but actually commit to foo_1. Other parties could then switch to foo_2...
(I admit this is basically a variant of the master-file approach you suggested yourself; but if there are not many actual changes to those files this at least reduces the numer of conflicts you have to think about)
After reading Michael Lopp's book "Being Geek," I started using Dropbox as a means of synchronizing files between my home computer and work computer. It's been fantastic, it really makes it painless to keep track of the latest version of files you're working on.
My question has to do with people's experience with this tool, especially programmers who may have used it to develop larger projects.
Right now, I see 3 main uses of Dropbox:
1. synchronize files between home and work computers
2. version control (you have to log into the dropbox site to access previous versions)
3. off-site backup
Right now I'm using it as my main backup tool, which I'm not sure is a good idea. But right now I have a local (working) copy of my entire project "checked out" on each computer (my home laptop and my work computer), and additionally, my entire project is kept on the dropbox site. So I'm thinking, if anything happens to one of my computers, or both, I'll still have that off-site backup available and I'll simply have to reinstall dropbox to access all my files.
Does anyone have experience with doing this? Has anyone done a major file recovery using dropbox? Or is this even widely used? Thanks for your feedback in advance.
Using Dropbox to maintain several files and its associated metadata when those files are historized in a VCS is always a bit tricky because of potential corruption issue (if one of those metadata part of the repository isn't correctly synchronized, you can end up with a non_working repo)
That is why I always use with DropBox:
a DVCS (like Git): I can work directly in a working tree within a DropBox repo or I can clone said repo anywhere else outside the DropBox if I need to,
a single bundle file to which I can push at any time the changes from my local repo, wherever that repo might be.
That way, the only file that really need to be in sync in DropBox is that unique bundle file (representing a bare repo as one file).
See "Git with DropBox" for more.
I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible.
Currently our team has a VSS database where our projects are stored.
Developers grab the code and place on their localhost machine and develop locally.
Designated developer grabs latest version and pushes to development server.
The problem is, when a file is removed from the project (by deleting it in VS2008) then the next time another developer (not the one who deleted it) checks in, it prompts them to check in those deleted files because they still have a copy on their local machine.
Is there a way around this? To have VSS instruct the client machine to remove these files and not prompt them to check back in? What is the preferred approach for this?
Edit Note(s):
I agree SVN is better than VSS
I agree Web Application project is better than Web Site project
Problem: This same thing happens with files which are removed from class libraries.
You number one way around this is to stop using web site projects. Web Site Projects cause visual studio to automatically add anything it finds in the project path to the project.
Instead, move to Web Application Projects which don't have this behavior problem.
Web Site projects are good for single person developments.
UPDATE:
VB shops from the days gone past had similiar issues in that whatever they had installed affected the build process. You might take a page from their playbook and have a "clean" build machine. Prior to doing a deployment you would delete all of the project folders, then do a get latest. This way you would be sure that the only thing deployed is what you have in source control.
Incidentally, this is also how the TFS Build server works. It deletes the workspace, then creates a new one and downloads the necessary project files.
Further, you might consider using something like Cruise Control to handle builds.
Maybe the dev should take care to only check in or add things that they have been working on. Its kind of sloppy if they are adding things that they were not even using.
Your best solution would be to switch to a better version control system, like SVN.
At my job we recently acquired a project from an outsourcing company who did use VSS as their version control. We were able to import all of the change history into SVN from VSS, and get up and running pretty quickly with SVN at that point.
And with SVN, you can set up ignores for files and folders, so the files in your web projects dont get put into SVN and the ignore attributes are checked out onto each developer's machine
I believe we used VSSMigrate to do the migration to SVN http://www.poweradmin.com/sourcecode/vssmigrate.aspx
VSS is an awful versioning system and you should switch to SVN but that's got nothing to do with the crux of the problem. The project file contains references to what files are actually part of the project. If the visual studio project isn't checked in along with the changes to it, theres no way for any other developer to be fully updated hence queries to delete files when they grab the latest from VSS. From there you've got multiple choices...
Make the vbproj part of the repository. Any project level changes will be part of the commit and other developers can be notified. Problem here is it's also going to be on the dev server. Ideally you could use near the same process to deploy to dev as you would to deploy as release. This leads into the other way...
SVN gives you hooks for almost all major events, where hooks are literally just a properly named batch file / exe. For your purposes, you could use a post-commit hook to push the appropriate files, say via ftp, to the server on every commit. File problems solved, and more importantly closer towards the concept of continuous integration.
Something you may want to consider doing:
Get Latest (Recursive)
Check In ...
Its a manual process, but it may give you the desired result, plus if VS talks about deleted files, you know they should be deleted from the local machine in step 1.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
Background
I work on a lot of small projects (prototypes, demos, one-offs, etc.). They are mostly coded in Visual Studio (WPF or ASP.NET with code written in C#). Usually, I am the only coder. Occasionally, I work with one other person. The projects come and go, usually in a matter of months, but I have a constantly evolving set of common code libraries that I reuse.
The problem
I've tried to use source control software before (SourceGear Vault), but it seemed like a lot of overhead when working on a small project, especially when I was the only programmer. Still, I would like some of the features that version control offers.
Here's a list of features I'd like to have:
Let me look at any file in an older version of my project instantly. Please don't force me through the rigmarole of (1) checking in my current work, (2) reverting my local copy to the old version, and (3) checking the current version back out so I can once again work on it.
In fact, if I'm the only one on the project, I don't ever want to check out. The only thing I want to be able to do is say, "Please save what I have now as version 2.5."
Store my data efficiently. If I have 100 Mb of media in my project, I don't want that to get copied with every new version I release. Only copy what changes.
Let me keep my common library code files in a single location on my hard drive so that all my current projects can benefit from any bug fixes or improvements I make to my library. I don't want to have to keep copying my library to other projects every time I make a change.
However, do let me go back in time to any version of any project and see what the source code (including the library code) looked like at the time that version was released.
Please don't make me store a special database server on my machine that makes my computer take longer to start up and/or uses resources when I'm not even programming.
Does this exist?
If not, how close can I get?
Edit 1: TortoiseSVN impressions
I did some experimenting with Subversion. A couple observations:
Once you check something in to a repository, it does stuff to your files. It puts these hidden .svn folders inside your project folders. It messes with folder icons. I'm still yet to get my project back to "normal". Unversion a working copy got me part of the way there, but I still have folders with blue question mark icons. This makes me grumpy :-/ Update: finally got rid of the folder icons by manually creating new folders and copying the folders over. (Not good.)
I installed the open source plugin for Visual Studio (AnkhSVN). After creating a fresh repository in my hard drive, I attempted to check in a solution from Visual Studio. It did exact what I was afraid it would do. It checked in only the folders and files that are physically (from the POV of the file system) inside my solution folder. In order to accomplish item #5 above, I need all source code used by solution to be check in. I attempted to do this by hand, but it wasn't a user friendly process (for one thing, when I selected multiple library projects at once and attempted to check them in, it only appeared to check in the first one). Then, I started getting error dialogs when I tried to check in subsequent projects.
So, I'm a little frustrated with SVN (and its supporting software) at this point.
Edit 2: TortoiseHG impressions
I'm trying out Mercurial now (TortoiseHG). It was a little bit difficult to figure out at first, no better or worse than TortoiseSVN I'd say. I noticed an RPC Server on startup (relates to item 6). I figure it should be possible to turn this off if I'm not sharing anything with anyone, but it wasn't something I could figure out just by looking at the options (will check out the help later).
I do appreciate having my local repository as just a single .hg folder. And, simply throwing the folder in the Recycle Bin seemed to be all I needed to do to return everything back to normal (i.e., unversion my project). When I check in (commit), it seems to offer a simple comment window only. I thought maybe there would be a place to put version numbers.
My (probably not very clever) attempt to add a Windows shortcut (a folder aliasing my library projects) failed, not that I really thought it would work :) I thought maybe this would be a sneaky way to get my library projects (currently located elsewhere) included in the repository. But no. Maybe I'll try out "subrepos", but that feature is under construction. So, iffy that I'll be able to do items 4 and 5 without some manual syncing.
Any of the distributed source control solutions seem to match your requirements. Take a look at bazaar, git or mercurial (already mentioned above). Personally I have been using bazaar since v0.92 and have no complaints.
Edit: Heck, after looking at it again, I'm pretty sure any of those 3 solutions handles all 6 of your requested features.
Distributed Version Control Systems (Mercurial, Bazaar, Git) are nice in that they can be completely self-contained in a single directory (.hg, .bzr, .git) in the top of the working copy, where Subversion uses a separate repository directory, in addition to .svn directories in every directory of your working copy.
Mercurial and Subversion are probably the easiest to use on Windows, with TortoiseHG and TortoiseSVN; the Bazaar GUIs have also been improving. Apparently there is also TortoiseGit, though I haven't tried it. If you like the command line, Easy Git seems to be a bit nicer to use than the standard git commands.
I'd like to address point 4, common libraries, in more detail. Unfortunately I don't think any of them will be too easy to use, since I don't think they're directly supported by GUIs (I could be wrong). The only one of these I've actually used in practice is Subversion Externals.
Subversion is reasonably good at this job; you can use Externals (see the chapter in the SVN book), but to associate versions of a project with versions of a library you need to "pin" the library revision in the externals definition (which is itself versioned, as a property of the directory).
Mercurial supports something similar, but both solutions seem a bit immature: subrepository support built-in to the latest version and the "Forest Extension".
Git has "submodule" support.
I haven't seen anything like sub-respositories or sub-modules for Bazaar, unfortunately.
I think Fog Creek's new product, Kiln, will get you pretty close. In response to your specific points:
This is easily done through the web interface -- you don't need to touch your local copy or update. Just find the file you want, click the revision you want to see, and your code will be in front of you.
I'm not sure you can do things exactly like "Please save this as version 2.5", but you can add unique tags to changesets that allow you to identify a special revision (where "special" can mean whatever it wants to you).
Mercurial does a great job of this already (which Kiln uses in the back end), so there shouldn't be any problems in this regard.
By creating different repositories, you can easily have one central 'core' section which is consistent across various projects (though I'm not entirely sure if this is what you're talking about).
I think most version control systems allow you to do this...
Kiln is hosted, so there's no hit on performance to your local machine. The code you commit to the system is kept safe and secure.
Best of all, Kiln is free for up to two licenses by way of their Student and Startup Edition (which also gets you a free copy of FogBugz).
Kiln is in public beta right now -- you can request your account at my first link -- and users are being let as more and more problems are already resolved. (For some idea of what current beta users are saying, take a look at the Kiln Knowledge Exchange site that's dedicated to feedback.)
(Full Disclosure: I am an intern currently working at Fog Creek)
For your requirements I would recommend subversion.
Let me look at any file in an older version of my project instantly. Please don't force me through the rigmarole of (1) checking in my current work, (2) reverting my local copy to the old version, and (3) checking the current version back out so I can once again work on it.
You can use the repository browser of Tortoise Svn to navigate to every existing version easily.
In fact, if I'm the only one on the project, I don't ever want to check out. The only thing I want to be able to do is say, "Please save what I have now as version 2.5."
This is done by svn copy . svn://localhost/tags/2.5.
Store my data efficiently. If I have 100 Mb of media in my project, I don't want that to get copied with every new version I release. Only copy what changes.
Given by subversion.
Let me keep my common library code files in a single location on my hard drive so that all my current projects can benefit from any bug fixes or improvements I make to my library. I don't want to have to keep copying my library to other projects every time I make a change.
However, do let me go back in time to any version of any project and see what the source code (including the library code) looked like at the time that version was released.
Put your libraries into the same svn repository as your remaining code and you'll have global revision numbers to switch back all to a common state.
Please don't make me store a special database server on my machine that makes my computer take longer to start up and/or uses resources when I'm not even programming.
You only have to start svnserve to start a local server. If you only work on one machine you can even do without this and use your repository directly.
I'd say that Mercurial along with TortoiseHg will do what you want. Of course, since you don't seem to be requiring much, subversion with TortoiseSvn should serve equally well, if you only ever work alone, though I think mercurial is nicer for collaboration.
Mercurial:
hg cat --rev 2.5 filename (or "Annotate Files" in TortoiseHg)
hg commit ; hg tag 2.5
Mercurial stores (compressed) diffs (and "keyframes" to avoid having to apply ten thousand diffs in a row to find a version of a file). It's very efficient unless you're working with large binary files.
Symlink the library into all the projects?
OK, now that I read this point I'm thinking Mercurial's Subrepos are closer to what you want. Make your library a repository, then add it as a subrepository in each of your projects. When your library updates you'll need to hg pull in the subrepos to update it, unfortunately. But then when you commit in a project Mercurial will record the state of the library repo, so that when you check out this version later to see what it looked like you'll get the correct version of the library code.
Mercurial doesn't do that, it stores data in files.
Take a look on fossil, its single exe file.
http://www.fossil-scm.org
As people have pointed out, nearly any DVCS will probably serve you quite well for this. I thought I would mention Monotone since it hasn't been mentioned already in the thread. It uses a single binary (mtn.exe), and stores everything as a SQLite database file, nothing at all in your actual workspace except a _MTN directory on the top level (and .mtn-ignore, if you want to ignore files). To give you a quick taste I've put the mtn commands showing how one carries out your wishlist:
Let me look at any file in an older version of my project instantly.
mtn cat -r t:1.8.0 readme.txt
Please save what I have now as version 2.5
mtn tag $(mtn automate heads) 2.5
Store my data efficiently.
Monotone uses xdelta to only save the diffs, and zlib to compress the deltas (and the first version of each file, for which of course there is no delta).
Let me keep my common library code files in a single location on my hard drive so that all my current projects can benefit from any bug fixes or improvements I make to my library.
Montone has explicit support for this; quoting the manual "The purpose of merge_into_dir is to permit a project to contain another project in such a way that propagate can be used to keep the contained project up-to-date. It is meant to replace the use of nested checkouts in many circumstances."
However, do let me go back in time to any version of any project and see what the source code (including the library code) looked like at the time that version was released.
mtn up -r t:1.8.0
Please don't make me store a special database server on my machine
SQLite can be, as far as you're concerned, a single file on your disk that Monotone stores things in. There is no extra process or startup craziness (SQLite is embedded, and runs directly in the same process as the rest of Monotone), and you can feel free to ignore the fact that you can query and manipulate your Monotone repository using standard tools like the sqlite command line program or via Python or Ruby scripts.
Try GIT. Lots of positive comments about it on the Web.
I just wonder what the best approach is to have multiple users work on a Project in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
We got a Solution with multiple Class Libraries, but when everyone opens the solution, we keep getting the "X was modified, Reload/Discard?" prompt all the time. Just opening one project is an obvious alternative, but I find it harder to use as you can't just see some of the other classes in other projects that way.
Are there any Guidelines for Team Development with VS2005 Pro?
Edit: Thanks. The current environment is a bit limited in the sense there is only 1 PC with RDP Connection, but that will change in the future. Marking the first answer as Accepted, but they are all good :)
What you need is source control.
You should definitely not open the same files over the network on multiple machines. For one thing, Visual Studio has safeguards in place to prevent you from modifying certain files during a build, but it has none of that that will prevent others from modifying the same files over the network.
By setting up source control, each developer will have a separate copy of the files locally on his or her developer machine, and periodically communicate with the source control system to check in/commit changes. After that, other developers can ask for the latest updates when they're ready to retrieve them.
Use source control to keep a central repository of all your code. Then each user checks out their own copy of the source code and works locally. Then submits only the code that changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control
A number of people have recommended using source control and I totally agree. However you also need do the following.
Exclude your personal options files from the repository (eg your .suo files)
Exclude your App.config files from the repository. - Not entirely but you need to have a Template.App.config. You commit that instead, and only copy your App.config into the Template.App.config when you make structural changes. That was each user has their own individual config for testing.
There are probably some other files worth excluding (obj directories and so forth) but thats all I can think of right now.
Peter
This might sound snide, but if you're opening up the solution from a shared location then you're doing something wrong. If that's the case then you should start using source control (something like Subversion) and have everyone check out a copy of the project to work on.
However if you're already using source control, then it might be a symptom of having the wrong things checked in. I find that you only need the sln, and the vcproj under source control.
Otherwise I don't know...
You should definitely, definitely be working with source control!
This will help stop the collisions that are occurring. Also, if you are making changes to the shared projects this often that it is a problem, then also ensure that all code is tested before getting checked in (otherwise they may bust someone else's build), but make sure they check in often (or time gained from not dealing with prompts will be lost in merging conflicts) :)