VS2003 / Vault 3.0.5 Issues

[spiercey]

We are having a variety of issues with Vault. Some of them appear to be moreso the fault of Visual Studio itself but I would assume that you would have encountered these before in your testing and may be able to help us out.

The issues below are not consistent among machines, ie: some developers seem to have no problems, whereas others do have these problems. Any relevant VS settings within the IDE seem to be consistent across machines.

Version Info:
Visual Studio 2003 - 7.1.3088
Vault Client 3.0.5
We have added vbproj as a mergeable file type.
We are working in non-integrated IDE mode (all versioning interactions are through the Vault client).
We are working in CVS Style (Auto-commit = False, Require Check out before check in = False; Make all files writable; Always request exclusive locks = False)

1) Unchanged files showing up in pending change set - often times we have files showing up in the pending change set that are not in fact modified (Show Differences indicates files are identical). This issue occurs with both vbproj and regular class files.

2) File deletions are not being detected by Visual Studio.
If files are removed from the VB project, a get latest does in fact remove remove the files from the client machine (although this is not noted in the Messages pane). However, Visual Studio does not detect that the vbproj file has changed, nor does it detect that the files were deleted, even after doing a refresh in the solution explorer. It is not until you try to open the file until it realizes the file has been deleted, at which point this error occurs: "The item 'zzzzzzzzzz.vb' does not exist in the project directory. It may have been moved, renamed or deleted."
However, ADDING files **is** detected by Visual Studio, and a warning is raised in the IDE indicating a modification has been made to the vbproj file and allows you to reload the project, at which point the IDE pulls in the newly added files. So, this one would seem to be a visual studio problem, but my question is, I assume the Vault team would have encountered all of the bugs and quirks of VS and possibly incorporated them into a "best practices" document of do's and don'ts? These are just two of the issues we have been having, there have been several others. Iideally it would be nice to have a document that tells you exactly how to set up a muli-project solution for non ide integrated, non exclusive checkout editing.....is there such a thing?

[dan]

1) Unchanged files showing up in pending change set - often times we have files showing up in the pending change set that are not in fact modified (Show Differences indicates files are identical). This issue occurs with both vbproj and regular class files.

This will happen sometimes when a program (Visual Studio, for instance), saves a file even though there are no changes made to it. Vault uses the file timestamp by default to determine whether a file is modified. However, you can change this in the options dialog to use file contents instead of timestamp, which will be a little slower, but more accurate.

2) File deletions are not being detected by Visual Studio.
If files are removed from the VB project, a get latest does in fact remove remove the files from the client machine (although this is not noted in the Messages pane). However, Visual Studio does not detect that the vbproj file has changed, nor does it detect that the files were deleted, even after doing a refresh in the solution explorer. It is not until you try to open the file until it realizes the file has been deleted, at which point this error occurs: "The item 'zzzzzzzzzz.vb' does not exist in the project directory. It may have been moved, renamed or deleted."
However, ADDING files **is** detected by Visual Studio, and a warning is raised in the IDE indicating a modification has been made to the vbproj file and allows you to reload the project, at which point the IDE pulls in the newly added files. So, this one would seem to be a visual studio problem, but my question is, I assume the Vault team would have encountered all of the bugs and quirks of VS and possibly incorporated them into a "best practices" document of do's and don'ts? These are just two of the issues we have been having, there have been several others. Iideally it would be nice to have a document that tells you exactly how to set up a muli-project solution for non ide integrated, non exclusive checkout editing.....is there such a thing?

Unfortunately, we don't have a document concerning Visual Studio. We don't have a lot of control over what works and doesn't in VS SCC integration, so this would be a moving target for each release. It is a good idea, we just haven't been able to get one together. In the meantime, you are doing the right thing by posting to the forum for answers to issues like this, even if the answers aren't very satisfying