Working on a Visual Studio project with multiple users?

Question

I'm just wondering what the best approach is for multiple users to work on a project in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.

We have a solution with several class libraries, but when everyone opens the solution, we continue to get "X has been changed, Reload / Discard?" tell me all the time. Just opening one project is an obvious alternative, but it's getting harder for me to use, because you can't just see some of the other classes in other projects this way.

Are there any recommendations for developing a team with VS2005 Pro?

Edit: Thank you. The current environment is a bit limited in the sense that there is only 1 PC with an RDP connection, but that will change in the future. Marking the first answer as Accepted, but they are all good :)

Answer 1

Use the control source to keep the central repository of all your code. Then each user checks his copy of the source code and works locally. Then it sends only the changed code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control

Answer 2

What you need is version control.

You should not open the same files over the network on multiple computers. Firstly, Visual Studio has precautions so that you cannot modify certain files during the build, but it does not have any of them that will prevent other users from modifying the same files over the network.

When setting up source control, each developer will have a separate copy of files locally on his developer's machine and periodically contact the version control system to check / commit changes. After that, other developers can request the latest updates when they are ready to download them.

Answer 3

Some people recommend using a control source, and I completely agree. However, you also need to do the following.

• Exclude your personal settings files from the repository (e.g. your .suo files)
• Exclude App.config files from the repository. - Not really, but you need to have Template.App.config. Instead, you commit this and copy your App.config to Template.App.config when making structural changes. Each user had his own individual configuration for testing.

There are probably some other files that should be excluded (obj directories, etc.), but that’s all I can think of now.

Peter

Answer 4

It may sound snide, but if you open the solution from a common place, then you are doing something wrong. If so, then you should start using a control source (something like Subversion) and ask everyone to check out a copy of the project to work.

However, if you are already using the original control, this may be a sign that you have the wrong things. I believe that you only need sln, and vcproj is under source control.

Otherwise, I do not know ...

Answer 5

You should definitely work with source control!

This will help stop the collision that is taking place. In addition, if you often make changes to shared projects, that this is a problem, then also make sure that all the code is checked before being checked in (otherwise they can ruin someone else), but make sure that they often checked (or the time received from non-compliance with requests will be lost when merging conflicts) :)