Lazycoder

No problem Bill, I should clarify. 90% of the time when I’m just developing libraries in Visual Studio I have no problems. Most of the problems I encounter have to do with Web Projects in VS 2003 and earlier.

So we’re collaborating with two other institutions in two other states, sharing a SCM repository. We’re also working with some people internal at work so we have a local repository (Subversion). The problem comes in when we start to work on development or experimental branches. See Web projects in Visual Studio hardcode the URL of the web project on the local server and require you to create an application in IIS. So as I work on these experimental branches, I’m constantly editing .webinfo and .sln files to make sure I’m pointing at the correct version of the webproject. visual studio doesn’t know that I want the proejct located just off the root of the directory I’m in, it just goes to get the web project located at http://localhost/mywebproject or whatever the .sln file tells it to use. Since we all have different names for these proejects, it’s a hassle trying to run updates and sync to the different repositories. Say I create a branch called “foo” off of the trunk to work on, well the .csproj, .sln and .webinfo files are branched right along with it. So I checkout my new branch, open the .sln file and it loads all of the library projects correctly, but then it fetches the copy of the web project from the trunk rather than from the branch unless I make a point to create a new application pointing at my checked out branch, and edit the .sln and .webinfo files. Otherwise I end up doing all of my work in the trunk when I meant to make changes in the branch. This results in a huge mess when I go to merge.

In VS 2005 this won’t be as big of a problem, but that means we’ll have to port a lot of our code and migrate our projects. When I tried using Fritz Onions “ASP.NET projects without using web projects” examples, I kept getting file locking problems with dependant assemblies, like our data access assembly.