Brian Kohrs’ Blog

At work, we are looking at replacing VSS with Subversion. One of the things that we need to do before porting over is to remove all of the shared files in VSS. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Ruby script to identify all of the shares, and after some modifications by Joe I have used it to start eliminating our mass of shared files.

This morning, Sam and I were getting rid of shares, and there were a couple of files shared between two solutions. At one point, there was probably a reason to have separate solutions, but that is no longer the case. Wanting to fold the two solutions together, we shared the files in VSS to the proper location, add the projects to the solution, and then delete the old solution. At this point, we get a clean image from VSS, and then re-open the solution thinking everything should work just fine. Not the case. Visual Studio says that the source control bindings are invalid for the projects that I just added. I really think that it is a bad idea to put dependencies on the source control system in the solution, but that’s a topic for another day.

One would think that changing bindings would be easy, so I open the bindings dialog, unbind the projects, and re-bind them to the solution directory just like all of the other projects that were working just fine. That didn’t work. Now it was telling me that the new paths were invalid. After fighting with Visual Studio for about fifteen minutes, I get an idea. Maybe it is the issue is because it can’t find the old location in VSS. So I go into VSS and recover the old solution. Back in Visual Studio, I unbind and re-bind again. Now one of the new projects is showing up as valid, but the second one still has the issue. Not feeling to happy with Microsoft at this point.

When Visual Studio fixed the binding for one project, it made changed the project file. After looking at the diffs, I open up the other project, and manually change the server bindings. After re-opening the solution, everything works just fine.

Needless to say, I was not too happy with Microsoft this morning. It’s pretty bad that you have to open up files in an editor and make the changes manually instead of changing them in the user-friendly GUI. Unfortunately, this seems to happen quite a bit, much more than it should.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.