I am creating an application which will coordinate and organize a lot of standalone functions. For instance, the main application might be called ABC Company Operations, and within it might be Engineering Bills Of Material and Project Management Purchase Orders, among many others. I want to develop each of these tools as a standalone solution, then include them in the main application when I am done with them. For one thing this will allow me to distribute the main application with a fair number of tools complete, then issue an update when each new one is included, and for another thing having these functions in their own projects will cut down on the madness inside the solution explorer.
Searching and reading have shown me how to include existing projects in a solution, but they are included as a reference - the files continue to reside in the standalone solution. This is not good because I wish to make any changes needed in the standalone, then replace the project in the main solution when those changes are done and also because I would prefer not to have all these solutions hanging around in a public place.
I tried just copying and pasting the project directory from the standalone solution into the main solution, but the solution explorer hasn't picked it up and there are somehow two listings of the standalone in the main Visual Studio screen where you select which solution you will work on. This seems like a bad road, so before I continue down it I would like to ask for any advice you folk may have.
Visual Studio allows you to reference the same project in different solutions.
Right click the solution in the solution explorer > Add > Existing Project...
I have done it and it works perfectly.
But very often referencing the DLL of a class library project is just enough. Usually you would reference the bin\Release version. You can even reference an EXE.
I achieve something like what you want by using the Subversion code management system. I keep each project in a directory. These are top-level directories in the Subversion repository.
Each solution is also a top-level entry in the Subversion repository, but does not have any projects in with it. So I have in my repository something like this:-
project directory
project
files directory
files
project directory
project
files directory
files
single-project-solution directory
single-project solution
single-project-solution directory
single-project-solution
multiple-project solution directory
multiple-project solution
I then use svn:externals to include all the needful project directories when either a single project solution or a multiple project solution is checked out, and it ends up in the working copy like this:-
multiple-project solution directory
multiple-project solution
project directory
project
files directory
files
project directory
project
files directory
files
or
single-project-solution directory
single-project-solution
project directory
project
files directory
files
Related
I have several .csproj files that I will be importing a common .targets file into, to extend the build process. The projects are in different directories. The .targets file is in the solution directory. How do I refer to the location of the .targets file to import it? There's a solution directory property, but this doesn't work if the developer just builds a project. What do I do? I am using .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2015.
As you figured a project doesn't know about a solution it's contained in, and arguably it shouldn't. So there's not much you can do to programmatically figure out where, from the project's point of view, a totally unrelated file is situated. Apart from scanning the entire filesystem for it. There are some alternatives:
rely on a proper directory structure. You do this already anyway, since you use a solution which also needs to find projects in a fixed location. So suppose you have a main project dir with projectA/a.vcxproj, projectB/b.vcxproj and solutionDir/ab.sln and solutionDir/my.targets then in a and b just <Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)..\solutionDir\my.targets"/>
require a property (or environment variable) which is set to the location of the targets file and then use <Import Project="$(SomeDir)\my.targets"/>
put your targets file in a 'known' msbuild location like the Importbefore/ImportAfter directories, mentioned here for instance.
I've used all of these at one point and in the end the first is in my opinion the better one: you just have to stick with a directory convention - you need that anyway for projects spanning mulriple directories or with common shared stuff - and that's it. For example we have a ton of common msbuild files and they're in a single repository. Starting a new project always comes down to creating a directory, cloning the common files dir and adding a new project dir. That can it turn easily be automated, also works well on typical CI servers. The second option is also doable, but it relies on a properly setup environment which is less 'self-contained' and gets really messy if developpers start entering the variable in the machines' global environment variable settings, and in the local ones, and so on. Similar problems with the third one but worse since now there's only one correct location.
I have been searching around for an answer to this question, but I cannot find the documentation on it. I found a few similar questions asked here, but none that completely cover it?
Similar Question
What do all of the different files in the project directory do? I am trying to make my project open source and I don't want to have a ton of unnecessary files in my repository. What files are vital and what files will be generated when the user initially loads the project? Its important to note that this is a VB Form Application
Base Directory:
*.vb
*.Designer.vb
*.resx
*.vbproj
*.sln
*.vbproj.user
*.config
Any of the other folders in the base directory?
*/bin
*/Collection
*/My Project
*/obj
*/Resources
*.suo and *.user files can be ignored. They store user specific settings such as window arrangements, open files etc. Those files are generated by Visual Studio whenever a solution is opened.
*.vb files are somewhat important since they contain your source code...
*.sln and *.vbproj files tell Visual Studio which projects are in a solution and which files are in a project, respectively. They also contain project specific settings such as build plattforms, custom build events, target .NET Framework etc.
*.resx and app.config can be important, depending on your project. They should not be left out when you publish your project, however since they're part of the Visual Studio project. If they're truly not needed you can remove them from the project.
Edit
Folders bin and obj are where Visual Studio generates the compiled output so you should not include those when you publish the source code of your project. Any other folders are project specific so it depends on your project if they're needed or not.
As a rule of thumb, anything that is automatically generated should be excluded when you publish your source code.
Also, if you don't already, you should use a version control system such as Subversion or GIT to manage your sources. Any essential files / folders as explained above should go in there.
Q: Is it possible/feasible, to have a multiple solutions stored in a single 'Solutions' directory, and multiple NuGet packages stored in another single 'Packages' directory, and for everything to work nicely with different versions?
Further details...
For example: I have 2 projects. ProjectA requires Newstonsoft.Json.4.5.11, ProjectB requires Newstonsoft.Json.5.0.6.
For sake of example I have a solution file for both. I need all my solution files in the same directory (this is just the process that is followed, all the solutions in a directory are built in turn).
By default NuGet will create a packages directory alongside each solution file.
I have created a nuget.config file to allow me to store packages in a single directory, called 'SharedPackages', following this answer: Nu-Get & issue with project level dependences for projects referenced by multiple solutions
<settings>
<repositoryPath>..\SharedPackages</repositoryPath>
</settings>
This works great so far, so my structure is:
\Projects\ProjectA
\Projects\ProjectB
\Solutions
\SharedPackages
If I create ProjectB, it has Json.NET 4.5.11 by default. If I go to Manage NuGet Packages for Solution I have the option to update it to version 5.0.6. This is great as ProjectB needs the newer version. What is even better is now in my Shared Packages directory I have a directory for both versions of Json.NET side-by-side, so ProjectA can use the older version.
However, now I want to create ProjectC as a full MVC4 Web Application. For JQuery, you get version 1.8.2 currently when creating an ASP.NET MVC4 application in VS2012. I also get Knockout 2.2.0.
My process is, I delete the default packages directory, move the new solution to the Solutions directory alongside the existing nuget.config and edit the new solution file to update the relative path to the new .csproj file. Then when I build, NuGet Package Manager restores the extra packages I need (that weren't in use by ProjectA and ProjectB) to the Shared Packages directory. However... I get build errors, it cannot resolve some references including DotNetOpenAuth, WebGrease, System.Spatial... the references are pointing to the packages directory, not the SharedPackages directory...
As an aside: if I Enable Package Restore for solution, then it also tries to restore them to a packages folder within the Solutions directory by default, instead of restoring them to the SharedPackages directory.
Around about this point I realise that just creating the nuget.config file wasn't enough for ProjectA and ProjectB either, although they appeared to be working originally, the references in the .csproj. file are pointing to the bin folder beneath the project file, instead of my SharedPackages directory.
So I manually 'Find and Replace' ..\packages with ..\..\SharedPackages for all the references. I have to do this for ProjectA, ProjectB and ProjectC. Now everything builds and seems to work OK, new packages go into the right place.
Now, if I go back to ProjectA, and add the Knockout package, this is version 2.3.0. This installs happily alongside the other Knockout package in use by Project C which is version 2.2.0. Doing this also installs JQuery 2.0.3, alongside JQuery 1.8.2. So far so good.
Just as a sanity check, I create another Web Application - ProjectD, move the files around, update the references in the solution and the project. This time everything builds first time. I try and update WebGrease in ProjectD to see if it will retain the older version for ProjectC. This results in more issues, it installs it to the packages directory instead. WebGrease seems to have a separate config setting as well <WebGreaseLibPath>... it won't seem to restore...
I then go back to ProjectB and try 'Update All' - it looks like the files that already exist are updated in SharedPackages, with new version directories alongside the existing ones, but any new dependencies (e.g. now I have a reference to Owin.dll) get placed in the packages folder :( If I delete the packages folder, and the bin folder within ProjectB, then build the ProjectB solution, understandably I get build errors, the packages aren't automatically restored to the SharedPackages directory at any point.
Is it even possible to set NuGet to update packages in a common directory other than packages alongside the solution?
Would it be easier to just use the default packages folder, instead of SharedPackages, or would I still have problems?
This is turning into way too many questions. To try and keep it in scope, has anyone attempted a similar setup, what obstacles did they overcome and how did they manage it, or did they give up altogether? If you gave up, how did you end up using NuGet to manage packages in a massive code base?
I appreciate this is close to this question, which was well answered for that particular question, however the use case here is slightly different: NuGet and multiple solutions. It is also pretty much identical to this question: Setting up a common nuget packages folder for all solutions when some projects are included in multiple solutions, but I have decided to add this anyway as that question is more focused on the having different configurations for different solutions, whereas here I want all the packages in one place, I just want to implement it and see if it is possible. Also I think the troubleshooting and research time may be useful to someone.
I am using MSbuild for CI tool and have many C# projects located in different directories. There many dependents projects as well. Some developers use Add Project option to add project and some directly connect to .dll file and i have no control over it. some cases all projects added to a solution So if i compile that solution then it takes care of all dependencies. But i do not this in my auto build. I want to compile all .csproj and output .dlls to a particular folder and then all projects including web should point to this folder for reference.
Want to know if this a ideal process?
In my Project we do the same and it works. Sometimes we have project references and sometimes we have direct dlls references in a folder called "Solution DLLs".
How we do it:
The reason is that we have many projects (120 or more) and we have split them in several solutions. One of the solutions is for framework and commmon dlls. These Dlls are copied in postbuild scripts to a "Solutions Dlls" folder and checked in in TFS. Later our build scripts copy these solutions dlls...
How it works:
It works "fine" and is acceptable. But many problems came (and sometimes still come) with postbuild scripts not working fine. We are aiming to reduce the number of csprojs to 50-60 and use again one single solution.
Ok, so I've got a somewhat complicated problem with my build environment that I'm trying to deal with.
I have a solution file that contains multiple C# projects which is built by a NAnt script calling MSBuild - passing MSBuild the name of the solution file and a path to copy the binaries to. This is because I want my automated build environment (CruiseControl.Net) to create a folder named after the revision of each build - this way I can easily go back to previous binaries for any reason.
So idealy I have a folder layout like this
c:\build\nightly\rev1
c:\build\nightly\rev2
c:\build\nightly\rev3
...
c:\build\nightly\rev10
etc.
The problem that's arisen is I recently added the latest version of the Unity IoC container to my project, checking it directly out of MS's online SVN repository. What's happening is I have a Silverlight 3 project that references the Silverlight version of Unity but I also have other projects (namely my Unit testing project) that reference the standard (non-Silverlight) version of Unity.
So what happens is since MSBuild is dumping everything into one single folder the Silverlight version of the Unity assembly is overwriting the non-Silverlight version because they have the exact same assembly file name.
Then when CruistControl runs my unit tests they fail because they don't have the proper dependencies available anymore (they try to load the Silverlight specific Unity assembly which obviously doesn't work).
So what I want to do is:
keep my desired output directory
structure (folder\revision)
I don't want to have to manually edit
every single proj file I have as this
is error prone when adding new
projects to the solution
Idealy I would like MSBuild to put everything into a folder structure similar to this:
nightly\revision1\project1
nightly\revision1\project2
nightly\revision1\project3
...
nightly\revision2\project1
nightly\revision2\project2
nightly\revision2\project3
etc
I can't modify the Unity project to give it a different file name because it comes from another SVN repository I cannot commit changes to. I found a similar question posted here and the suggested solution was to use a "master" MSBuild file that used a custom task to extract all the project file names out of the solution then loop over each one building them. I tried that but it doesn't build them in the order of their dependencies, so it fails for my project.
Help?
Firstly I would always have the build server delete the old working copy and check out a fresh copy to avoid any problems with stale artifacts from the previous build.
Next I would have nant or msbuild build the solutions as before with the artifacts from each build going to their local working output folders.
After that I'd move the artifacts from their working paths to their output paths, this shouldn't require digging through the project files since you can just tell msbuild/nant to copy working\project1\bin\release\**\*.* to artifacts\project1\.
The script that does this should ideally be stored along with the source with the main file, e.g. build.nant or build.proj in top level of the trunk.
For third party libraries I would simple include the DLLs directory in your repository. Nothing worse than writing some code and having a third party dependency break your build because of changes on their end.
Simply document the versions of the libraries you are using, and if you must update them, you'll have a better sense of what breaks the build before you even check it in.
Also, doesn't CC.Net automatically handle the providing of releases based on revision? I'm using TeamCity and it keeps a copy of the artifacts of every build.
I highly recommend reading JP Boodhoo's Automating Builds with NAnt blog series. That's been my starting point and have made lots of changes for my own taste. I also highly recommend checking out the builds of many open sources projects for examples. I've learned a lot from the builds of the Castle/Nhibernate/Rhino-Tools stack.