How to setup VS 2003/2005/2008 project in Vault

[Hassan]

Hi,

We are using Vault 4.1.2.18185. We tried to get training but could not get it anywhere either via SourceGear or any other training company. Our projects are web projects and are in Visual Studio 2003 mainly and some new Visual Studio 2005 and some future projects in Visual Studio 2008. The projects are in a solution which is made up of the actual web project (with javascript, css, images , xml, xsl, aspx etc files) and several class library projects referenced by the web project.

We are not sure how to best utilise Vault to manage our projects for a small team of. Could someone make suggestions of how we can make use of Vault optimally. Perhaps whether to keep projects on the server or on each developers PC. The Vault help files show what the IDE does but do not explain the concept of Vault and how it works with web projects.

My questions are probably ambiguous so please ask anything that will help you to help us.

Thanks
H

[Beth]

To help narrow down what you need exactly, I have a few questions.

I'm assuming you already know how to work with VS 2003/2005/2008 without source control, correct?

Do you understand the basic functions of Vault without using it in an integrated fashion?

I think your first starting point is going to be the following:

• Eric Sink's Source Control How To
  Visual Studio .Net IDE Integration Overview: There are two links to a huge amount of information from Microsoft.
  Enhanced Client FAQ: A lot of the information here relates to the Classic Client as well. Which client you use will depend on how you wish to work. We will discuss that a little later in our conversation.
  Web Projects: This is a must-read from the FAQ.
  Vault KB article index: This has a large section on IDE integration, a small section on best practices, and loads of other information.

One thing you want to stay away from if possible is having every developer work from the same disk location. If you place the web project on a server and have every developer set their working folder to that, Vault won't be able to accurately tell each developer what is going on, because one has their own cache that is trying to monitor the same folder. What I've seen work the best is to have each developer code on their own machine and then to use shadow folders to mirror the most recent version of your website on the server if you want some central location just for viewing not for adding changes. Each developer should be able to either run IIS on their client machine with some limitations, or to use the built-in IIS capabilities in Visual Studio for testing the website.

Are your projects just web sites or web projects/solutions?

Can you draw me a diagram of your layout?