I've recently looked into a .ssmssqlproj file.
After quick trial/error it turned out, that Name attribute has no effect on the GUI. (btw it renamed after save, so after adding a 4th logical folder to the existing default three, there will be a duplicated in the project file.
<LogicalFolder Name="MiscellaneousTest" Type="3" Sorted="true">
<Items />
</LogicalFolder>
I am trying to give a logical structure within one project, instead of having the 1000 files in a flat structure.
Question
After this "interesting" behaviour, I would take a look to the XML schema of the .ssmssqlproj file.
Googled, and not found maybe I am missing something.
Related
okay, so i dont really know much about DLLs. but i need to edit some of them. ones that seem like archive files.
such as: firefox's xul.dll, windows/twain_32.dll
when i tried to open them in .NET Reflector, it couldnt open them. and a really downvoted answer on here made me realize they can be opened with 7zip, and seem to have files inside.
i can extract the files, but cant edit the dll, and i dont know how to create a dll like this. i dont have visual c++ or basic, and i dont know if i could do this with them.
thank you in advance, or how to say
A dll file usually contains program code (that is: binary code you can not easily understand). Some dll files may also contain resources, which can be sometimes edited with a resource editor (such as ResourceHacker).
dll files are no archives and their primary usage does not include holding files. Resources normally are rather small data elements such as icons.
Edit: If you open a dll file in 7zip, you will see some virtual files (which are no real files but sections of the binary object file, see symbol table and relocation table in object file for example) along with a virtual folder .rscs (abbreviation for "resources") that contains the mentioned resources you can edit with a resource editor. Again, remember these are not files. 7zip only displays them in a way you may think of files.
The object code inside of .text, .data and .reloc contains binary program code and initialization data along with the reallocation table. It makes no sense to edit those information unless you use a disassembler, can understand the generated assembler code, know about the pitfalls of disassembling, make senseful changes and are able to reassemble the code.
Not that even if you did so, you'd apply the disassembler to the whole object file instead of single sections.
I just joined a team that has no CI process in place (not even an overnight build) and some sketchy development practices. There's desire to change that, so I've now been tasked with creating an overnight build. I've followed along with this series of articles to: create a master solution that contains all our projects (some web apps, a web service, some Windows services, and couple off tools that compile to command line executables); created an MSBuild script to automatically build, package, and deploy our products; and created a .cmd file to do it all in one click. Here's a task that I'm trying to accomplish now as part of all this:
The team currently has a practice of keeping the web.config and app.config files outside of source control, and to put into source control files called web.template.config and app.template.config. The intention is that the developer will copy the .template.config file to .config in order to get all of the standard configuration values, and then be able to edit the values in the .config file to whatever he needs for local development/testing. For obvious reasons, I would like to automate the process of renaming the .template.config file to .config. What would be the best way to do this?
Is it possible to do this in the build script itself, without having to stipulate within the script every individual file that needs to be renamed (which would require maintenance to the script any time a new project is added to the solution)? Or might I have to write some batch file that I simply run from the script?
Furthermore, is there a better development solution that I can suggest that will make this entire process unnecessary?
After a lot of reading about Item Groups, Targets, and the Copy task, I've figured out how to do what I need.
<ItemGroup>
<FilesToCopy Include="..\**\app.template.config">
<NewFilename>app.config</NewFilename>
</FilesToCopy>
<FilesToCopy Include="..\**\web.template.config">
<NewFilename>web.config</NewFilename>
</FilesToCopy>
<FilesToCopy Include"..\Hibernate\hibernate.cfg.template.xml">
<NewFilename>hibernate.cfg.xml</NewFilename>
</FilesToCopy>
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyFiles"
Inputs="#(FilesToCopy)"
Outputs="#(FilesToCopy->'%(RootDir)%(Directory)%(NewFilename)')">
<Message Text="Copying *.template.config files to *.config"/>
<Copy SourceFiles="#(FilesToCopy)"
DestinationFiles="#(FilesToCopy->'%(RootDir)%(Directory)%(NewFilename)')"/>
I create an item group that contains the files that I want to copy. The ** operator tells it to recurse through the entire directory tree to find every file with the specified name. I then add a piece of metadata to each of those files called "NewFilename". This is what I will be renaming each file to.
This snippet adds every file in the directory structure named app.template.config and specifies that I will be naming the new file app.config:
<FilesToCopy Include="..\**\app.template.config">
<NewFilename>app.config</NewFilename>
</FilesToCopy>
I then create a target to copy all of the files. This target was initially very simple, only calling the Copy task in order to always copy and overwrite the files. I pass the FilesToCopy item group as the source of the copy operation. I use transforms in order to specify the output filenames, as well as my NewFilename metadata and the well-known item metadata.
The following snippet will e.g. transform the file c:\Project\Subdir\app.template.config to c:\Project\Subdir\app.config and copy the former to the latter:
<Target Name="CopyFiles">
<Copy SourceFiles="#(FilesToCopy)"
DestinationFiles="#(FilesToCopy->'%(RootDir)%(Directory)%(NewFileName)')"/>
</Target>
But then I noticed that a developer might not appreciate having his customized web.config file being over-written every time the script is run. However, the developer probably should get his local file over-written if the repository's web.template.config has been modified, and now has new values in it that the code needs. I tried doing this a number of different ways--setting the Copy attribute "SkipUnchangedFiles" to true, using the "Exist()" function--to no avail.
The solution to this was building incrementally. This ensures that files will only be over-written if the app.template.config is newer. I pass the names of the files as the target input, and I specify the new file names as the target output:
<Target Name="CopyFiles"
Input="#(FilesToCopy)"
Output="#(FilesToCopy->'%(RootDir)%(Directory)%(NewFileName)')">
...
</Target>
This has the target check to see if the current output is up-to-date with respect to the input. If it isn't, i.e. the particular .template.config file has more recent changes than its corresponding .config file, then it will copy the web.template.config over the existing web.config. Otherwise, it will leave the developer's web.config file alone and unmodified. If none of the specified files needs to be copied, then the target is skipped altogether. Immediately after a clean repository clone, every file will be copied.
The above turned out be a satisfying solution, as I've only started using MSBuild and I'm surprised by its powerful capabilities. The only thing I don't like about it is that I had to repeat the exact same transform in two places. I hate duplicating any kind of code, but I couldn't figure out how to avoid this. If anyone has a tip, it'd be greatly appreciated. Also, while I think the development practice that necessitates this totally sucks, this does help in mitigating that suck factor.
Short answer:
Yes, you can (and should) automate this. You should be able to use MSBuild Move task to rename files.
Long answer:
It is great that there is a desire to change from a manual process to an automatic one. There are usually very few real reasons not to automate. Your build script will act as living documentation of how build and deployment actually works. In my humble opinion, a good build script is worth a lot more than static documentation (although I am not saying you should not have documentation - they are not mutually exclusive after all). Let's address your questions individually.
What would be the best way to do this?
I don't have a full understanding of what configuration you are storing in those files, but I suspect a lot of that configuration can be shared across the development team.
I would suggest raising the following questions:
Which of the settings are developer-specific?
Is there any way to standardise local developer machines so that settings could be shared?
Is it possible to do this in the build script itself, without having to stipulate within the script every individual file that needs to be renamed?
Yes, have a look at MSBuild Move task. You should be able to use it to rename files.
...which would require maintenance to the script any time a new project is added to the solution?
This is inevitable - your build scripts must evolve together with your solution. Accept this as a fact and include in your estimates time to make changes to your build scripts.
Furthermore, is there a better development solution that I can suggest that will make this entire process unnecessary?
I am not aware of all the requirements, so it is hard to recommend something very specific. I can say suggest this:
Create a shared build script for your solution
Automate manual tasks as much as possible (within reason)
If you are struggling to automate something - it could be an indicator of an area that needs to be rethought/redesigned
Make sure your team mates understand how the build works and are able to make changes to it themselves - don't "own" the build and become a bottleneck
Bear in mind that going from no build script to full automation is not an overnight process. Be patient and first focus on automating areas that are causing the most pain.
If I have misinterpreted any of your questions, please let me know and I will update the answer.
using Cocos2d project template (for objective c)
I've got a nice little hierarchy setup in Xcode, e.g categorization with folders, multiple levels, however in the file structure, its just one big directory of files, should I leave it like that? Should I replicate the hierarchy in file structure manually? Should it be automated did I do something wrong?
As Protheus says, the group structure in XCode is for organizational purposes only and not synced with the file system. For some projects though, it might be worth to keep XCode's group structure and the file system in sync. For example, I like to edit my files with VIM from the command line sometimes. On big projects with several hundreds of files, it is much easier to find specific files if you have a logical structure in the file system.
I discuss this in more detail in this blog article.
As far as I know neither structure in xcode, nor structure in project folder affect the program.
You structure it all for your convinience only.
I'm looking for a utility that will help me find duplicate PDFs. The problem: I have a 1000s of PDF files. Some are duplicates. They are not easy to detect due differing files names and small differences in file size. Is there a utility/algorithm/library that can help me find the duplicates or show me files that are very similar (or degree of difference)?
Create an MD5 hash for each file and store it in a database. Identical files will then sort next to each other, or you can quickly search for a pre-existing key.
The problem is not yet solved in any way. What I do, is I use fdupes http://premium.caribe.net/~adrian2/fdupes.html to find exact duplicates.
But most of all, I use a workflow which minimizes duplicates. Every document that enters my system gets indexed with this perl-script I wrote: http://seegras.discordia.ch/Programs/fileindex which puts some name and an md5-sum of it into ~/.fileindex.md5 Now I can change metadata of the local PDF-files or whatever (and run fileindex again), and whenever I accidently download the same file again, I will stil lhave the md5-sum of the original file, and thus can detect whether it's a duplicate.
There's also exif-meta and exif-rename on http://seegras.discordia.ch/Programs/ which help with setting PDF metadata and with renaming PDF-files according to metadata; and if you're tagging all the files correctly, you will end up with duplicate filenames, indicating that they might be the same document within a different file.
If the files were created by the different tools, they could look the same but generate very different results because they are structured totally differently. I made some suggestions in a blog article at https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/09/comparing-2-pdf-files/
DiffPDF looks like something that might help you.
I remember that there is a UNIX utility called pdf2txt (see the package poppler-utils). You can try to extract the text from the files and make a textual diff.
I just started working with the JavaHelp package. I have done some basic modifying of the Table of Contents and such with no problems.
My issue arises in that I have created various new help files (added to an existing project within my dev team) and added various sections to existing help files. I now need to make sure that the index.xml file is updated, useful, and meaningful.
It seems as though this should be generated automatically but I can't seem to find a way to do it, and any solutions I've tried to use don't seem to work.
Is there even a way to do this?
You could always create a CodeSmith template to update this index file.
Thanks
-Blake Niemyjski