Can't open Visual Studio 2005 solution after Branch/Share

[ablesa]

I am trying to write procedures for how to maintain different versions of our Visual Studio 2005 solution. We will be installing it into production in the next week and we need to maintain a copy of our development code separate from our production code so that we can continue to develop for the next phase, but also be able to make bug fixes in production without having to deploy any newly developed code.

Before I tried anything on our project, I decided to create a small do-nothing project to test out the branch/share procedures to make sure things would work as we needed them to.

Project "Test" is in SourceOffSite (SOS) and here's what I did to branch/share it:
* Created a new project called "Test_Prod1.0" in SOS
* Set working directory for "Test_Prod1.0" to be a new directory on my hard drive
* Shared "Test" solution folder with "Test_Prod1.0", checking recursive and branch.

Everything looked great after this... I had two projects in SOS now and the original Test project on my harddrive and now another Test_Prod1.0. I could open the original Test solution with no problem. I opened it, made a change and checked it back in. All looked good. Then, I tried to open the solution "Test_Prod1.0". It would not open and indicated that the solution file was an "unrecognized version". I then opened Visual studio and tried to open it from within the IDE and when I did, I got the error: "The selected file is not a valid solution file."

Can you please tell me what I am doing wrong?
I need to leave my current development copy as-is, but I need a copy of it at the point that we installed in production so that I can make bug fixes as needed to the production copy without having to worry about deploying changes I have made in my development copy.

Thanks!

[ablesa]

I just realized that when I branched and shared, the solution file was not branched/shared in SOS... so, I guess somehow a default solution file got created on my hard drive...not sure how that happened...

However, I deleted my prod folder in SOS and cleaned out my folder on my hard drive and shared/branched again to make sure I got all files included this time and I still get errors when trying to open this shared/branched "prod" solution... its complaining now that the project file is invalid and it complained that it was already under source control. so, I deleted the *.vssscc and *.vspscc files from my hard drive in the "prod" folders and I still couldn't open the solution in the IDE. Again, it says that the project file is invalid.

I'm beginning to think that my best option here is to manually copy my solution (outside of SOS) and then delete any *.vssscc and *.vspscc files that were copied over, open it in IDE and then add it to SOS at that point. The only drawback to this is that there is no relationship in SOS between the development project and the Production project and I won't be able to merge the two together.

Any help you can provide would be great.

[Beth]

Take a look inside your solution file. Is it referencing the projects correctly? If it's referring back to any of the original projects instead of the branch, that could be causing a problem.

[ablesa]

The solution file looks fine. However, when I open the project file (in notepad), it is a garbled mess:
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I'm not sure why this happened... i shared and branched to create it.

Can you please tell me the proper steps to do what I am trying to do? Then, perhaps I can go through those steps and see if I have the same issue. Again, I am using Visual Studio 2005 and Visual SourceSafe 2005 and SourceOffsite Version 4.2

thanks for your response.

[Beth]

Try performing a Get with overwrite. What are the results then? Can you view the file?

F: 13671

[ablesa]

Thanks for your post. I did get latest with recursive and overwrite and I get the same results... the project file is still garbled.

[Beth]

Were you trying that Get from within Visual Studio? Could you go to your Vault GUI client, select the problematic project file and perform an individual Get on that file using the overwrite feature? Does that solve what you are seeing?

[ablesa]

well, I can't do the Get from Visual Studio because I cannot open the solution in Visual Studio. So, I did the Get from SourceOffSite. I did the Get on the whole project (recursive and overwrite)... I don't have Vault...

[Beth]

I'm sorry, I meant to say to use the SOS GUI client. Also, the Get needs to occur right on the file itself, not on a folder.

After you performed the Get, were you able to view the project file?

[ablesa]

WEll, I did go to the SOS Client and did get latest on the one project file. And I can now view the file in Notepad. BUT, the solution still doesn't open. I've attached the problems that I now see...

Solution-Project Errors with Versioning 1.doc

(81 KiB) Downloaded 749 times

[Beth]

These aren't going to be a problem. This is actually a step in the right direction. The binding information was for the original solution. Select to permanently remove the bindings. After that, go to File - Source Control - Change Source Control and bind it to the branch.

When you opened it, did you pick the same location or a different location on disk for the solution? If you picked the same location, then you can only work with the branch right now. If you chose a different location, then you could update the original from it's original location and you can update the branch from the branch location.