Working Offline in the Visual Studio .Net IDE

[dan]

If you work off-line on a laptop at home or on the road, or if your network connection is down, Visual Studio .Net will still attempt to connect to your Vault server when your project is started.

Therefore if you know ahead of time you will be off-line and want to continue to work on your project, it is best to set Visual Studio to work in disconnected mode while it is still connected (just before you leave). When in disconnected mode, Visual Studio will simulate checkouts (it will appear to checkout files, but they will not actually be checked out in the Vault server until you connect again).

To put VS.Net into disconnected mode, invoke File->Source Control->Change Change Source Control. This brings up a list with the solution and any projects within the solution that are under source control. Select all of them, and press the “Disconnect” button. Note: Do not press the Unbind button, which is meant to remove your association between the project and your local machine.

While Visual Studio is in disconnected mode, it will not attempt to login again when the project is loaded, even if when you get on-line again. It is important to connect again as soon as you have a network connection, so that files you have modified can be checked out or checked in, to reduce the likelihood of conflicts with other developers working on the same projects. To do this, invoke File->Source Control->Change Change Source Control and press the Connect button, or select the Connected checkbox for each project.

If you are offline, and bring up a project that wants to connect to Vault, simply cancel the login dialog when it comes up. Unfortunately, Visual Studio will keep asking Vault to attempt login multiple times (many more if you have a lot of projects in your solution). Simply continue to cancel the login attempts, and eventually Visual Studio will stop asking. This will automatically put you into disconnected mode, so you will need to remember to explicitly connect when you are on-line again, so changes can be checked back into Vault.