Environment Setup

eeyrcr · Post by **eeyrcr** » Tue Sep 19, 2006 5:50 am

Hi,

Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but here goes anyway!

I've been trialling the Vault and would like to roll it out accross our team of 5 developers. We build ASP.NET web sites using Visual Studio.NET, a Windows 2003 development server and Windows XP client machines.

I understand that the ideal way to operate in this environment is for each developer to run IIS on their workstation for their local development, adding their code back to the Vault and the central development server when they've completed a given piece of work.

The problem with this is that the Windows XP version of IIS will only allow you to have 1 web site - which is a problem as we develop web sites for several clients. I know that other people have run into this problem from my searches on the web, but I haven't found a solution.

So - the question is - how do you get around this problem in your working environments? What are the biggest problems you've encountered with your work-arounds?

Thanks in advance!
- Chris

Beth · Post by **Beth** » Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:04 am

I think there's a little confusion here. The Vault Server I am assuming will be running on your development server and that is the portion that needs IIS. When you are working on a piece of code on your client, as soon as you check it into your Vault client it will go to the server. The Vault client keeps a copy on your machine and bases the statuses off of that, but as soon as something is entered into the Vault client it will be in the database on the server. That is the only area where you need to be concerned about how many websites you can have.

Does this answer your question or are we misreading each other's posts?

eeyrcr · Post by **eeyrcr** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 7:56 am

Hi Beth,

Thanks for the response. The problem is that when you're working on web sites, you don't have local copies of the files on your hard disk - they're all stored on the web development server.

So - if you're editing files and recompiling code on the same server as all of the other developers, you may end up messing things up for them whilst you're developing your code.

Ideally, each developer would have IIS installed on their local machine so that they can work on their own version of the site, pushing updated files back into the Vault / central development server when they're done and tested.

The main problem being that in Windows XP (running on the developer's machines), you can only run one web site, which limits you to working on one web site at a time.

Does that make any sense?

Thanks,
- Chris

Beth · Post by **Beth** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:53 am

I could be misunderstanding what you are trying to do. As I understand it, one doesn't typically need multiple websites on the machine.

The developers here use multiple virtual directories on the one web server. Basically each web app has its own virtual directory in the one web site within IIS.

Would that scenario work in your situation?

eeyrcr · Post by **eeyrcr** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 11:38 am

Hi Beth,

Virtual directories for this would be a solution, I guess.

I could be wrong, but presumably this means that we'd have to go through ALL of the code in our existing web sites to make sure they don't use any absolute path references for links, images, css files, etc.? (so change "/default.aspx" to "../../default.aspx", for example) In many cases, we use an ASCX control for navigational elements throughout a site, so not being able to refer to the root of the site with a simple '/' may be problematic!

Also - can each virtual directory have it's own web.config and other things like application level events in the global.asax.vb ?

(please excuse my ignorance on this - it's just that I've only ever used separate web sites for each application!)

Thanks,
- Chris

Post by **jclausius** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 10:00 am

Chris:

I would recommend working in an isolated manner so the situation you described (developers "stomping" on each other's code) is avoided.

For the whole gambit of Web Development within Visual Studio and its use with a Source Control tool like Vault, see Web Projects and Source Control Integration in Visual Studio .NET.

eeyrcr · Post by **eeyrcr** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 3:16 pm

Thanks, jclausius!

That document was very useful and cleared up quite a few issues for me.

There is still one specific problem I'm running into, which perhaps you can help me with?

We often have ASCX controls that we use throughout our sites. In them, we reference image files and stylesheets relative to the root of the site (ie "/styles/layout.css"). So - no matter which folder the ASPX which uses the ASCX file is in, it all still works. Using virtual directories means that we will no longer be able to do this.

How do you get around this problem when the development machines will use virtual directories and the live server will use actual sites?

Thanks,
- Chris

Post by **jclausius** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 3:27 pm

Does every app use a /styles/ directory? If so, what if you laid out the repository with $/styles/ and mapped that to a virtual directory named "styles" on the end-users IIS server?

You may not be able to use the integrated Vault client with Visual Studio, but when anyone tries to use a DIFFERENT working folder setup than Visual Studio for Web Applications, they are fighting an uphill battle anyway.