Git – How to Deal with Merging Visual Studio Projects

gitmergingvisual studio 2010

Visual studio projects, as opposed to makefiles or other projects I know, have some quirks:

The directory structure of the project has no real connection to actual directory structure – all directories are purely virtual – this makes it harder to re-add mass of files while keeping directory structure
The project consists of rather complex XML, that file contains everything from files to compiler settings

Now whenever I merge branches, I have conflict on the project files, because everyone inadvertently changes them as they operate over the project. Often the changes happen in such ways that the merge tool does not even recognize conflict properly. In those cases, files end up missing in the project, outdated settings reappear and so on.

Our project is 2010 C++ solution consisting of five separate sub-projects.

Are there any strategies that would have low impact on the development process, but would alleviate problems caused by merging project files?

Best Answer

I find there are a couple things you can do to virtually eliminate this problem.

More projects. Spreading code changes over more projects means less chance of a merge conflict and simpler projects files when you do get them.
Build all your branches on the build server. This picks up build failures due to people forgetting to save the project when they add a file. Before they merge in their branch.
Make everyone use the same version of visual studio
Make sure as many settings as possible go in the .csproj.user file rather than .csproj and exclude this from source control.

Related Solutions

GIT – Best Practices for Maintaining Web Application Templates

I think your idea of cloning your template is best. But you can tweak that by using GitHub or similar site.

With GitHub you would fork for each new project based on your template.

The fork would create a brand new git repository but based on your template.

Now if one your projects has an update you would like picked up in your original template repository, you could submit a pull request to the original template. Others could too, if you wanted to share.

Then you would simply accept the pull requests you found that you want to incorporate into your original project.

Git – How to Undo a Git Merge That Wipes Files Out of the Repo

If I understood correctly, this is your situation:

    ,-c--c--c--c--M--a--a--X ← develop
o--o--y--y--y--y-´

After some common history (o), you committed and pushed your work (y). Your coworker (c) did work on his local repository and did a bad merge (M). Afterwards there might be some additional commits (a) on top of M.

git reset --hard develop M^2
git branch coworker M^1

Now your graph looks exactly like before the bad merge:

    ,-c--c--c--c ← coworker
o--o--y--y--y--y ← develop

Do a good merge (G):

git checkout develop
git merge coworker

Resulting in:

    ,-c--c--c--c-、
o--o--y--y--y--y--G ← develop

Now transplant the additional commits:

git reset --hard X
git rebase --onto G M develop

This gives the final result:

    ,-c--c--c--c-、
o--o--y--y--y--y--G--a--a--X ← develop

Be aware that this might result in more merge conflicts. Also you just changed history, i.e. all your coworkers should clone/reset/rebase to the new history.

PS: of course you should replace G, M and X in your commands by the corresponding commit id.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

GIT – Best Practices for Maintaining Web Application Templates

Git – How to Undo a Git Merge That Wipes Files Out of the Repo

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