R – Visual Studio&Source Control: How to have shared code

version controlvisual studiovisual-sourcesafe

i want to have some shared code (code library, controls, utilities, helper classes, etc) in Visual Studio. i do not mean shared assemblies, i mean shared code (i.e. i want to ship one assembly with my application, the executable assembly).

The technique in other development environments way is to have the common source code in a path on my machine, and the IDE is given a list of paths to search for code files.

Visual Studio does not support code search paths.

The back-up hack solution is to copy the source-code over and over into every project. But then in order to keep them all as one version, they are shared in source control. This works well when your source control provider is Microsoft Visual SourceSafe – which supports shared files.

But other source control products (CVS, Subversion, Microsoft Team Foundation Source Save Server, SVN) do not support shared files.

So how does everyone else avoid shipping DLL's with their executable?

Update 1

It is an issue of single file deployment. ClickOnce generates 18 files in 3 folders (i.e. more than one file)

Best Answer

I could propose two solutions:

Visual Studio allows you to add a link to a file. Choose "Add Existing Item", pick your file and then click the arrow next to the "Add" button. A popup will display and you should choose "Add as link" from there. Now you can store your common code in one location (folder).

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Compile your common code in reusable assemblies and use them in your projects. Use ILMerge to merge all assemblies into one when deploying. I personally prefer this option.

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Should I add the Visual Studio .suo and .user files to source control

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

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