Where is the legend - VS2005 IDE solution explorer icons

[jboy]

Only just switched to the Visual Studio 2005 IDE integration (from the Vs2003 compat one).

Wow - what a revelation!.

The switch could have been a bit more seemless. I found an article in the knowledge base about how to do it, but it could have been a bit more "team friendly", if you know what I mean.

What do I mean?

Well I mean that it is a fair assumption to make that when using a SCM system like Vault that there is probably a Team of people working on each project in Vault. So when you switch from the VS2003 client to the VS2005 client it needs to be fairly orchestrated or else some team member's project bindings EXPLODe and leave them non-operational for a day.

The loss of productivity is a small matter - what is of far greater concern is the assault on their trust levels w.r.t Vault. Over the years I have witnessed that MOST developers are somewhat intimidated by SCM systems. There is an element of voodoo-usage going on, where they're really not 100% sure whether the SCM is going to be nice today, or whether it is going to vandalise their code.



Anyway, my point - if there was one - was that it would be great if you take a little more care in the future to add some steps to such procedures that take into consideration the impact it will have on other emembers of the team.

Even if the procedure started off with just some simple warning/reminder steps. Like;

1. It is best if all team members have nothing checked out. Coordinate with them to have everything checked in before proceeding.

2. If your team members do not share a bound solution for the projects you are converting, you should do this ..... to ensure everyone preserves their sanity.



Now the initial purpose of this post. Where is the legend that explains what each of the different file icons in the Solution Explorer means?

Would be fantastic if ;
a) they were published in the help/documentation somewhere,
b) there was a "Vault IDE Legend" menu-item hanging off the solution explorer context menu that popped up a dialog menu with the legend of what the different file icons mean.

I am constantly asked by our team what they mean and i basically just have to guess.

[gmagana]

I hear you, and agree with you... But as a fellow user I will say this: The users have to take on the responsibility of learning to use source control, and source control must be taken seriously, and given the correct priority (which should be "very high" unless you enjoy losing source code).

I had the same problem at my place... We switched to CVS style development, and all hell broke loose. People would "resolve merge" without asking, seeing, or realizing what they were doing, or they would roll back other people's changes, or simply never check in files that were in merge required status ("It works for me, so I'm happy" they seemed to think)... I had to insist they learn how to fix these situations gracefully, and even held a mini seminar on what the hell "needs merge" means and what their individual responsibility is to fix it. They liked to right click and select "resolve merge" because it seemed to fix things (it actually overwrote some else's changes with their outdated version).

Anyway, I would recommend that you appoint someone as the "knowledge leader" for source control at your shop (probably that will be you). Then that person should teach everyone else what to do. Specially teach everyone to resolve tricky situations such as manual merges.

As to the icon meanings, you can just put the mouse over the icon and it will tell you what it means, no?