I want to start using Mercurial on a VB.Net project, but I'm not sure which files should I add. Do I include the Project.sln file, bin/ and obj/ folders?
I would recommend using the hgignore detailed in this SO post
there is one that has 100+ up votes that would be a good starting point
With every source control, you should only include source files (i.e. files that are not generated during the build process), and the complete set of files necessary to build a solution. This does include the .sln file (for ease of use of the project in Visual Studio) but not the bin and obj folders, nor (usually) the user-specific settings (.suo), nor auto-generated files that can be re-generated.
A good rule of thumb is to only include things that you cannot easily regenerate. So, source code obviously meets this role and so does resources like images, sounds, and other data you need. Objects and the actual binary you generate from the source code usually are easy to get again and generally do not need to go in.
As for the sln file, if you will be making edits to the sln file and that's how others are to build the project, then you probably want to include that as well. If you generating the sln file from some other process (e.g., a script generates the sln and then builds it from that), then it's probably a good idea to leave that out.
Here's an MSDN article called Introducing Source Control. It lists files you can and cannot add to source control.
Related
I have multiple websites which use /wwwroot/assets folder (html theme, css and javascript files) to load the static content.
Currently I am copying assets folder in each site. All of my projects are sitting under a common parent directory.
I don't want to copy the /wwwroot/assets folder into each website. Is there a way to share one assets folder between all sites. May be by providing a direct file system path or something?
At the moment it's not clear from the documentation what sorts of values the webroot key in the project.json file will accept, but so far it would appear that Visual Studio doesn't care for very complicated paths. For example, setting the value to ../wwwroot causes the entry to disappear in the Solution Explorer.
If you look at the kpm code that bundles your project up for deployment, it appears to combine your project's directory with whatever is stored in the wwwroot key, so even though Visual Studio may not understand it, relative paths appear to be supported. Using kpm bundle from the command line confirms this, and a directory above src bundles correctly when using a relative path.
Depending on your particular needs, there is one way that should work that makes kpm and Visual Studio happy, but it will depend on your build environment as to whether that is a good option for you.
Windows, OSX, and Linux all support creating symbolic links for directories, which would allow you to have your assets directory in one location in the filesystem and then create links to it elsewhere. For example, if you had assets in /projects/shared/assets, you could create a link in both of your other projects (e.g. /projects/project1/src/wwwroot/assets) that point to the "real" location.
In Windows, the command would might something like this
mklink /j "C:\link\to\create" "C:\path\to\assets"
So if you did
mklink /j "C:\source\shared\assets" "C:\source\project1\src\wwwroot\assets"
project1 would appear to have an assets directory inside of wwwroot and the build process would be happy since it would appear to each project that the files were local. One thing to note here is that Windows supports a number of different sorts of links. /j specifically creates a junction rather than a true symbolic link. The differences are a bit subtle, but this is a good description of the differences. It is enough to know that if you're working locally, the /j command doesn't require administrative rights and Visual Studio and kpm will both be happy.
In OSX and Linux, the command is similar:
ln -s /link/to/create /path/to/assets
and like Windows, they support different sorts of links.
In any case, under the right circumstances, this might work well without needing any special support from the new ASP.NET project structure, but it would be nice to eventually have that as well.
I want to set up my HelloWorld intellij-erlang project with all files in the same directory so I can easily switch between IDEA and emacs/vim.
<my-project>/hello.erl
<my-project>/hello.beam
Now, if I configure the output directory to be the same as the source, hello.erl gets emptied as part of the build and the compilation fails.
I assumed it's something to do with copying resources to the output directory, so I've configured intellij-erlang to exclude *.erl from the resources with a !?*.erl pattern, but this does not have any effect, hello.erl still gets emptied before the compilation takes place.
As an experiment, I've also tried using separate src and out directories, and intellij-erlang always copies the *.erl to out irrespective of the resource patterns.
Based on all this, I would conclude that intellij-erlang cannot work with all files in the same directory. Have I missed anything?
Erlang programs should be build on standard OTP directory structure. Build tools like rebar (used by intellij) or erlang.mk build on this conventions. And so should all IDE's.
Intellij does it, just like you notice. And so does Emacs's plugin (that I use and can confirm). I would guess so does Vim's one.
So if you would like to be able to switch easily between your IDE's you should try to keep to this convetion of keeping you source files in src and compiled files in bin (and headers in include).
I have written a program on Visual Basic. In the debug folder, there are many files:
Database1.mdf
Database1_log.ldf
MyData.Designer.vb
MyData.xsc
MyData.xsd
MyData.xss
WindowsApplication1.exe
WindowsApplication1.config
WindowsApplication1.pdb
WindowsApplication1.vshost
WindowsApplication1.vshost.exe
WindowsApplication1.vshost.exe.manifest
WindowsApplication1.xml
I want to publish my program. Are all of those files necessary for the program? Which of them are used for my database?
Because I want to put a button in my program that backs up the database. Which files must be backed up?
First of all, you should publish the Release version of your software, not the debug version so the files will be a bit different. As for which files to publish, if you use the Setup project you will be able to select the files based upon what your application needs. For example, it looks like you are including database files with your application (Database1.mdf and Database1_log.ldf). You could add these files to the setup project.
The setup project will know to include your exe and your config file (unless you tell it not to) so you will be covered there. Here is a video and a written walkthrough of how to create a Setup project:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241903.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcue0jo41AM
As for your PDB files, these are the Program Database Files that are used for debugging (and should never be give to the customer/end user).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241903.aspx
As for backing up your database, back up the MDF and LDF files.
No, all of the files above are from your debug compile output. You can change what is output by changing your build configuration. Go to Build, Configuration Manager and switch to Release. It's also on the toolbar.
In general your ProjectName.exe (but not the .vshost.exe), .config (but not the .vshost.exe.config) and MDF/LDF files are needed for publishing. You also have an XSD File which will also be needed.
The MDF/LDF files are your database.
I started using sass scss stylesheets. These generate *.css files from *.scss files. My question is, which files do you check into version control? Right now I check in both main.scss and the generated main.css. I wonder though if there is a way to just check in the *.scss file and to ensure that the *.css files get generated on deployment.
I prefer to check them in. We deploy to our staging and production environments from git and I prefer not to rely on yet another tool/compilation when deploying to production. This way, its absolutely clear what is being pushed out.
In general, you usually don't need to check generated files into source control. As long as your code generation works consistently, and you use it consistently to update your target .css files, I don't think you would need to put them in source control.
That said, the suggestion to not put generated files into source control is usually intended more for binary files (i.e. libs or executables generated from a build). The main reason for this is that binary files cannot be easily diffed/merged, so if multiple people try to checkin changes to the same binary, you may end up with merging issues that cannot be easily resolved. Since you're dealing with plain text css files, I don't think it's that big of a deal to just put them in source control too, just so you have a backup of the actual target file.
I like to borrow from the conventions used by server side developers when handling compiled front-end code like sass. I keep all of my source separate from compiled code. Here's how I set it up:
Put your source in a src directory, under main/language-name, in this case:
/path-to-my-app/src/main/sass/my-syntactically-awesome-file.scss
Then put tests in an identical test directory (you shouldn't need any tests for sass, though:
/path-to-my-app/src/test/sass/my-syntactically-awesome-test.whatever
Then put your compiled code in a publish-ready directory, like so:
/path-to-my-app/publish/css/my-syntactically-awesome-file.css
Then commit the whole shebang (!)
You can make sure you are always putting your css in the right place like so:
$ cd /path-to-my-app
$ sass --watch src/main/sass/*.scss:publish/css/
Now you're a mother effing programmer, baby!
I have a project where I create a JAR which contains a bunch of classes with main() plus a set of scripts which set the environment to invoke them. Most of those are long running processes which log a lot (~10-20GB).
This means I have a pretty complex log4j.xml file which, being in src/main/resources/, goes into the JAR. When something breaks in the production system, I'd like to modify the logging on the fly for a single run.
So I came up with the idea to have a conf/ directory on the production and put that into the classpath, first. Then, I thought that it would be great if M2 would put the config files in there (instead of the JAR). But that would overwrite any manual changes during an automated deployment which I strongly dislike. I'm also not fond of timestamps and things like that.
So my next ideas was this: M2 should leave the config files in the JAR but create copies of the files with the name *.tpl in the conf/ directory. The admin could then copy a template to the basename to override the files in the JARs. .tpl-Files would be overwritten but that wouldn't hurt. Admins would have full control over which version of the log was active and they could run a diff to see whether any important changes were made.
Now the question: Has someone seen a plugin which automates this process? That is which creates a conf/ directory with all or a selected subset of everything in src/main/resources/ and which renames the files?
Best practice in Maven handling config files is to place them in a separate conf directory, and pack them in a binary assembly using the assembly plugin. Placing configuration files, like log4j.xml in the src/main/resources doesn't make sense, since it is not a true application resource, but more of a configuration file.
We cope with the overwriting, by packing the configuration files with the posfix .def. For example: myapp.properties is packed into the assembly as myapp.properties.def. When the person who uses the assembly unpacks it, it will not overwrite his original files. After unpacking he simply merges them by an external tool (we use meld in Fedora Core).
I may be missing something and this doesn't answer directly the question but did you consider producing a zip assembly of the exploded content of required artifacts (to be unzipped on the target environment)?
Sounds like you're attacking the problem the wrong way. Why not just run the application with -Dlog4j.configuration=/some/where/my-log4j.properties? If you want, you can add a command line flag to main() which invokes the PropertyConfigurator directly.