Chris Szurgot's Blog

I've finally gotten enough machines at the office to start implementing some best practices, a dedicated build/test environment, and automated build environment, and Unit Test (with NUnit) and I've one very important thing to say....

Implement these things, and implement them as soon as you can.

Unit Testing has already saved me once, and I've only been using it for a few days, and I can tell that automating the build environment is valuable, but it's a pain to do with a large set of projects. The sooner you implement, the less you'll have to do all at once.

For example, when you do a recursive get from VSS “SS.EXE GET -R $/ProjectName” and there are sub-projects, it automatically places them as subdirectories of the current project, even if they have there own working folders (as a web project that is a sub-project of the solution) But, the files need to be in the web directory to properly build. And if you open Visual Studio after doing this, it tries to reget the web files because the working directory has changed (ARGGH!!!)  So instead of using a full GET of the solution, I've had to get each individual project to it's own directory, and the solution files non-recursively. Key lesson, don't use VS.NET for anything but “DEVENV /build” and don't use SS GET -R on the solution if things go into separate directories.

On the plus side, I now have a first draft of automation that can recreate all of the directories and build from Source Safe, so Yeah me!