How do I build sample code, split into folders in a repo, from a class or tutorial, in Visual Studio?
So - I'm pretty much a noob at C#, I've gone through a lot of tutorials and browsed through some large C# projects from work and built them, and done some other minor things. I'm going through a course on writing testable code on Pluralsight. He has a public Github repo for the code examples, writing-testable-code. I connected to the repo and downloaded it okay into a local Git repo. I was able to download all the packages from NuGet and they are all showing as the version he used (a few have updates, but I figured updating might break things).
I can't figure out how to run this code, build it, or run the tests in it.
What I tried so far
My issue is - I open the solution, and there are a bunch of files and folders - each module/chapter is split into folders (i.e. Module1/Easy, Module1/Hard, Module2/Easy, etc.). I want to build the Module1/Easy folder, including unit test examples, and run the tests.
When reviewing Module1/Easy, it has 3 files that should build okay - the program.cs has a main() and looks like a console app, the Calculator.cs has a simple class, and the CalculatorTests.cs has unit tests built for Nunit. The solution has NUnit, Castle.core, and things from later modules (Moq, AutoMoq, Unity, Ninject, etc.). It didn't seem to have a VS runner, so I added Nunit3TestAdapter - the guy in the course has resharper installed, which I don't, and he was using the Resharper test runner, which would explain why he didn't include it.
I tried setting the "Module1/Easy/Project.cs" file the "Set as Startup Item", since it has a main and looks setup as a console app. However, running it (the "Start" button turned into a "Program.cs" button), it fails saying it can't run a dll. The tests aren't showing up in the Test Explorer like some other small projects I've built from examples.
What's the right way to do this?
I'm not sure where to go from here. On the Build menu is only a "Build Solution" and one about Code Analysis - I'm used to a lot more options here. It feels like I have to turn this folder into a project, maybe? I can always reinstall the packages - but what is the best solution here?
I've run into this before on other book, tutorial, or class repos, but finally decided to figure out how to get this one working. I appreciate any help!
Notes
I'm running Visual Studio Community 2017 at the moment.
I can post some of the files, but the repo is publically available, and not sure exactly what to post to help.
Progress from comments and answers
Per Biker-Dude's answer, I switched the project to build a console app rather than a dll, and now I get a compile-time error for having multiple entry points (i.e. every module and sub folder has its own Main() function and should probably be a separate project).
After #1, I removed all folders but one from the solution, it will then compile, run the tests, etc. - but I eventually want to be able to at least separately compile every sub-folder - what's the best way?
The problem must be that the project must have the output type set to class libraries. Browse through the solution tree and:
Select your class's project> right click > Properties > Application >
Output Type > Console Application/ Windows Application.
This should fix it, if the other things are set up properly.
With the help of BikerDude's answer and stijn's comments, I was eventually able to play around with this and get some things working.
First of all, don't try to exclude any folders in this situation, that will just make things worse! They will still be in your underlying folder/repo, just won't be showing up in your solution anywhere, and you won't be able to create a new folder with the same name (weird decision...). And you'll have to add them back in as individual files - I think.
The best solution (so far)
The best solution seems to be:
Create a new project for each buildable set of files in the solution (in my case, at least one project per "module" folder). I used the ".Net framework console app" project type (right click on the solution, use Add/New Project) to get things to work, but this would depend on the particular course or tutorial repo you downloaded.
Move the folder or sub-folder that has the files you want to build out of the main solution and into the new project - you can click and drag to move it.
Visual Studio will make an empty, pre-formatted file in your project that you likely have to delete - for .Net apps, this is the "Program.cs" file in C#. For one of my folders this file already existed, and I had to delete the new one in order to build. Another folder from a different module was setup more like a library and couldn't build standalone, but this procedure did get me to being able to build the files and that allowed the unit tests to show up in the test explorer and run the tests successfully (which was the main point of that module).
Go to the solution and right-click and choose "Manage Nuget Packages for Solution". As long as all the packages are installed for the main solution, then they will all show up in the list of Installed Packages (you might need to click on the "Installed" tab). You can click on each package in turn, then on the right you can checkmark the new project, and the "Install" button should be available - click it. Repeat for all the packages to install them all. Note that you can cut out some repetition here if you create all the projects you need first, then you can install all of them at the same time in this step (i.e. checkmark all the new projects at once instead of reopening the package manager each time).
You might have to fix the NameSpace - it should be consistent within the files/folders you transferred from the original solution, but if you add any new files to play with things, the Namespace for it will likely not match, and to see classes, etc. in the original files, you'll have to update your Namespace on the new files.
Per BikerDude's answer - After transferring everything to new projects, if you keep anything in the original project that came with the solution, it might not be trying to build the right type of item. You may be able to fix that by right-clicking the project, selecting properties, and adjusting the "output type", but it may not have the options you need. If it doesn't, just create a new project with the right type and transfer the files as above.
After following the above steps, I was able to build each new project I created, using the original files from folders that I moved. Mainly I just needed to build, which enabled all the unit tests that this tutorial/class was focused on, but this allowed me to build the console apps as well, when present.
Thanks for the help from all in pointing me in the right direction!
Related
This is a follow-up to this question. I followed the steps as described here and the sample tests work as expected. This is the first time I got to this working sample, but wait for the real working setup which is where I am having trouble.
As a next step to testing my app, I added my UWP app project using "Add Reference..." to the xUnit Test project. Now, after I referencing my project, when I run the test (Run All in Test Explorer pane VS2015) I get the following error:
Error Payload contains two or more files with the same destination path 'Assets\SplashScreen.scale-200.png'. Source files:
...\Projects\Sample\SampleUnitTest\Assets\SplashScreen.scale-200.png
...\Projects\Sample\Sample\Assets\SplashScreen.scale-200.png SampleUnitTest
There are two more errors, exactly as above, but referring to Square150x150Logo.scale-200.png and Square44x44Logo.targetsize-24_altform-unplated.png image files.
I can understand what these errors mean; the app being tested and the test project both generate visual resources (splash-screen image, logo, taskbar icon, etc.) destined for the same output but these are required to register the app(s) and run (on a local machine in my case). I've never come across such a contentious issue of two projects outputting the same visual resources and hopefully someone knows how to solve this. The unit test doesn't work if I change the project to Class project, so that is not an option.
How do you deal with the contentious situation (wrt visual resources) between an xUnit test project and a project being tested?
Okay, I figured out how to resolve the conflict between the visual resources residing in the Assets folder, but this leads to a new kind of issue for the xUnit (which will be my follow-up question).
For the xUnit project, rename the Assets folder to, say, Images (or whatever you think is a better alternative name).
Point to the Package.appxmanifest file under xUnit project and open it as a code file. To do this, select the Package.appxmanifest file and press F7, or right-click the file and select the View Code context menu command.
In the code file, replace the folder name Assets with Images or whatever you chose to rename the Assets folder with. Save it.
Now the test project will compile and run with no visual resources output conflicts. With regard to xUnit however, we'll hit another problem as described in my next question.
Background: My team is made up of 3 fairly inexperienced developers. We are developing in-house software for our company. Currently we have a number of smaller and separate solutions. Many of these are interdependent. Currently these depencies are made by referencing the output dll's in the respective release-folder. Updates are pushed around by manually rebuilding dependent solutions.
Example:
Solution A uses features of solution B. The connection is made having Solution A referencing ...\Release\B.dll . Changes to B propagates by building solution B, then building solution A and so forth.
This has worked okay before, but now we are moving from a manual (mind numbing) "version control system" (folder1, folder2, folder2New...) to using a proper one (git).
It seems that versioning the .dll's is not recommended. This means that every time someone wants to build a new version of A, he also needs to build B (and maybe 5 other solutions) in order to have the latest version of B.
I'm thinking that there must be a better way to do this.
I've been looking at combining the relevant solutions into one master solution, but I can't figure out how to do this in Visual C# Express (which we are using).
So at long last the questions:
Is having a master solution that builds everything the way to go?
-- it seems so from MSDN but I can't figure out how to do this in Visual C# Express 2008, which leeds me to
Is this even possible in Visual C# Express? If not, what is a
good way of managing the problem?
Edit Thanks to all for the great suggestions below. Here's a summary of what I ended up doing.
In short the answers to the questions are: "Yes" and "Sort of, but mostly yes". I implemented as follows: In order to get an idea of the dependencies, I did as suggested below, and drew a map of the binary products, with an arrow pointing from the dll's or exe's name to all of its dependencies.
For each project, I opened its corresponding solution (since at first there was one solution pr project). I then added the projectfile of each dependency in the tree structure revealed in the graph (by right-clicking the solution in solution explorer), so that also dependecies's dependencies and so forth were included. Then I removed the old references (pointing directly to the .dlls) and added references to the projects instead.
The important result is:
When a solution of a project is built, all it's dependencies are built with it, so that when deploying, you know that all the build products are automatically of the latest version.
I would create a new solution and add all of the projects that relate to each other to it. You can group the projects from each of the original solutions by putting them in different solution folders within the new solution. This way, when you build a project, all of the projects it depends upon will also get built. It also means that all of your projects will be built using the same configuration (i.e. Release or Debug). This means that all of your projects can be built in Debug, not just the top one in the dependency tree while everything below it is a Release assembly. Makes debugging much easier.
I have Visual C# Express 2010 and when I create a new project, it automatically creates a default solution. If it's visible, then you can right-click on the solution and choose Add>Existing Project.
If the solution is not visible, (I seem to remember this problem in C# Express 2005/8), then you can add an existing project via File>Add>Existing Project. The solution should be visible now.
In terms of speration, what I usually do is this:
Everything that must be built together should be in one solution, and these should be projects and not DLL's. I try to live by The Joel List, where you should be able to build your project in one step. If it is one deployable unit, then there should be one solution. All of my projects are built on a build server before they can be deployed, so everything should be in the solution that needs to be built.
Guys sometimes put the WCF services project and the clients in the same project for easy debugging, but it depends on whether you want to deploy client and server independently. Usually for bigger projects I separate them.
Lastly there's one exception. We have a central common library that is used by different teams. If it's included in different solutions, and one team changes something, we end up breaking the other team's builds. In this case, we create a single solution that has all of the library projects. These get built to DLL's that we store the versions of. We treat these as a framework that the other solutions can use. E.g. Team A is using CommonLibrary 1.1 and Team B is using CommonLibrary 1.2.
You need to think of Solutions as just "groupings of projects" - the projects are what are actually "built", not the "solution" (well, that's not entirely true, the solution is turned into a "metaproject" that references the contained projects, but its close enough to the truth)
If you have interdependencies between solutions, I would suggest drawing all the projects on a big whiteboard, then draw arrows representing the dependencies from project to project. Once you've done this, you'll be able to see at a glance what the appropriate "groupings of projects" make sense. Those become your solution files.
For example, if you have projects A, B, ..., F, where:
A depends on B
B depends on C
D depends on C
E depends on F
One possible split here would be solution 1 with projects A, B, C, D and solution 2 with projects E, F.
I would come up with a common area to push all dlls. My company uses the "R" drive, which is just a LOCAL (not network so no one can touch another persons folder) mapped folder everyone has. Each solution will build to this. Right click a project, properties->build and change the output. Or you can add a post build command to push the dll there. After that, have all of your projects reference this location.
Once this is done and everything is pointing at the same place, you can even add different combinations of projects to different solutions. If a developer only wants the ui projects, they can open a special "ui" solution that is a subset of the whole.
Here is a post build event that I use in my project properties->build events
rem when building on local workstation copy dll to local R:\
if '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' (
xcopy $(TargetDir)$(TargetName).* R:\Extranet\$(TargetName)\1.0\ /Y
)
rem if "Enterprise" build then copy dll to Corp R:\ drive and to Build Machine R:\
if '$(Reason)' == 'Manual' (
xcopy $(TargetDir)$(TargetName).* \\folder\$(TargetName)\1.0\ /Y
xcopy $(TargetDir)$(TargetName).* R:\Extranet\$(TargetName)\1.0\ /Y
)
We have a moderately sized solution, with about 20 projects. In one of them I have my business entities. On compiling any project, visual studio waits and hangs about one and a half minutes on this BusinessEntities project.
I tried our solution in SharpDevelop and it compiles our complete solution, in 18 seconds. Similar timing with MSBuild.
My guess is that VS is trying to find out if the project needs a compile, but this process is about 15 times slower than actually performing the compile!!
I can't switch to the great sharpdevelop, it lacks some small, but essential requirements for our debugging scenarios.
Can I prevent VS from checking this project, And have it compile the projects without such a check, just like sharpdevelop?
I already know about unchecking projects in configuration management to prevent building some projects, but my developers will forget they need to compile this project after updating to latest sources and they face problems that seem strange to them.
Edit: Interesting results of an investigation: The delay happens to one of the projects only. In configuration manager I unchecked all projects, then compiled each of them individually. All projects compile in a few seconds!! The point is this: if that special project is built directly, compiles in a few seconds, if it is being built (or skipped, because it is up-to-date) as a result of building another project that depends on it, VS hangs for about a minute and half, and then decides to compile it (or skip it). My conclusion: Visual studio is checking to know if any files are changed, but for some reasons, for this special project it is extremely inefficient!!
I'd go to Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run and then change the "MSBuild project build [output|build log] verbosity" to Diagnostic. At that level it will include timings which should help you track down the issue.
We had the same problem with an ASP.NET MVC web project running in Visual Studio 2013. We build the project and nothing happens for about a minute or so and then the output window shows that we are compiling.
Here's what fixed it... open the .csproj file in a text editor and set MvcBuildViews to false:
<MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews>
I had to use sysinternals process monitor to figure this out but it's clearly the cause for my situation. The site compiles in less than 5 seconds now and previously took over a minute. During that minute the Asp.net compilation process was putting files and directories into the Temporary Asp.net Files folder.
Warning: If you set this, you'll no longer precompile your views so you will lose the ability to see syntax errors in your views at build time.
There is the possibility that you are suffering from VS inspecting other freshly built assemblies for the benefit of the currently compiling project.
When an assembly is built, VS will inspect the references of the target assembly, which if they are feshly built or new versions, may include actually loading them in a .Net domain, which bears all the burdens of loading an assembly as though you were going to run it. The build can get progressively slower as it rebuilds more and more projects. When one assembly becomes newer the others do a lot more work. This is one possible explanation for why building by itself, versus already built, versus building clean, all have seemingly relevantly differing results. Its really tht the others changed and not about the one being compiled.
VS will 'mark down' the last 'internal' build number of the referenced assembly and look to see if the referenced assembly actually changed as it rolls through its build process. If its not differnt, a ton of work gets skipped. And yes, there are internal assembly build numbers that you dont control. This is probalby not in any way due to the actual c# compiler or its work or anything post-compile, but pre-compile steps necessary for the most general cases.
There are several reference oriented settings you can play with, and depending on your dev, test, or deployments needs, the functional differences may be irrelevant, however may profoundly impact how VS behaves and how long it takes during build.
Go to the references of one of the projects in Solution Explorer:
1) click on a reference
2) open the properties pane if its not (not the Property Pages or the Property Manager)
3) look at 'Copy Local', 'Embed Interop Types', 'Reference Output Assembly'; those may be very applicable and probably something good to know about regardless. I strongly suggest looking up what they do on MSDN. 'Reference Output Assembly' may or may not show in the list.
4) unload the project, and edit the .proj file in VS as text. look for the assembly reference in the XML and look for 'Private'. This means whether the assembly referenced is to be treated as though its going to be a private assembly from the referencing assemblies perspective, vs a shared one. Which is sort of a wordy way of saying, will that assembly be deployed as a unit with the other assemblies together. This is very important toward unburdening things. Background: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164080.aspx
So the basic idea here is that you want to configure all of these to be the least expensive, both during build and after deployment. If you are building them together, then for example you probably really don't need 'Copy Local'. Id hate to say more about how you should configure them without knowing more about your needs, but its a very fine thing to go read a few good paragraphs about each. This gets very tricky however, because you also influence whether VS will use the the stale old one when resolving before the referenced one is rebuilt. As a further example explaiing that its good to go read about these, Copy Local can use the local copy, even though its stale, so having this set can be double bad. Just remember the goal at the moment is to lower the burden of VS loading newly built assemblies jsut to compile the others.
Lastly, for now, I can easily say that hanging for only 1.5 mins is getting off very lucky. There are people with much much worse build times due to things like this ;)
Some troubleshooting idea's that have not been mentioned:
Clean solution?
Delete Obj and Bin folders plus the .suo file? FYI, neither Clean nor Rebuild will delete non-build files, eg files copied during a pre-build command.
Turn off VS scanning outside files. Options > tools > environment > document > detect when file is changed outside the environment?
Rollback SVN history to confirm when it started to occur? What changed? If the project file on day 1 takes the same time, recreate the project, add all the files and build.
Otherwise could you please run Process Monitor and let us know what Visual Studio is doing in the prep-build stage?
Sounds silly, but remove all breakpoints first. It sped up my pre-build checks massively - still don't know why though.
Based on the (limited) information provided one possibility is that there could be a pre-build action specified in the project file that is slow to compile.
Try disabling platform verification task as described here.
If your individual projects are compiling correctly then all you can do is change order of compilation by setting dependent projects explicitly in configuration.
Try to visualize your project dependency hierarchy and set dependent projects. For example, if your business entities project is referenced in each project, then in configuration of each project, this project must be selected as dependent.
When an explicit build order is not set, visual studio is analyzing projects to create an order of building project. Setting explicit dependent projects wiki make visual studio skip this step and use the order provided by you.
With such an extreme delay on a single project and no other avenue seeming to provide a reason I would attempt to build that specific project while running procmon from sysinternals and filter out all the success messages. You could probably also narrow it down to just the file system actions as well. From your description I might guess that the files are being locked by an external source like the event collection or workflow management process services.
Other things to consider would be whether or not this is a totally clean build machine or if it has been used to perhaps test the builds as well? If so, is there a chance that someone mapped an IIS application path to the project directly or registered it as a service location?
If you run procmon and see no obvious locks or conflicts I would create a totally new solution and project and copy the files over to see if that project also has the same delay. If it does have the same delay I would create a sample project of the same type but generic data (essentially empty) and see if that too is slow. If the new project with the same files builds fine you can then diff the directories to see what the variance is that causes the problem (perhaps a config or project setting).
For me, thoroughly disabling code analyzers helped per instructions here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/disable-code-analysis?view=vs-2019#net-framework-projects.
I thought my code analyzers were already off, but adding the extra xml helped.
Thanks Kaleb's for the suggestion to set "MSBuild project build [output|build log] verbosity" to Diagnostic. The first message took more than 10 seconds to display:
Property reassignment: $(Features)=";flow-analysis;flow-analysis" (previous value: ";flow-analysis") at C:\myProjectDirectory\packages\Microsoft.NetFramework.Analyzers.2.9.3\build\Microsoft.NetFramework.Analyzers.props (32,5)
Which led me to the code analyzers.
Just in case someone else trips into this issue:
In my case the delay was being caused by an invalid path entry in "additional include directories" that referred to a non accessible UNC location.
Once this was corrected, the delay disappeared.
I am working on a C# application which I have divided it to few projects. Recently when the solution becomes larger, I get different errors such as MissingMethodException or even worse, DLL not found messages.
The only solution is to delete my bin folder and build the project again.
I wonder if this is a common problem with visual studio or might be I am doing something wrong?
UPDATE:
I am working on a winforms soloution, while one project is the form and other projects are user control, data models and etc.
I do reference the needed project in other projects using the visual studio's add reference option.
UPDATE 2
I am suspecting when I have a new .cs file to extend a class using partial keyword in any projects this happens!!!! I am 99% sure, I am going to check some more times to see of this is really the case!
It's not really a common problem but messy things can happen some times on visual studio.
What I would do is to check the settings and dependencies of every project and check things like they build in the correct order, platform, output path, etc. In our case, some times when the solution travels to many developers/computer settings can alter.
Also another thing you could do would be to copy the main project to a new solution and add the rest of the projects. This has worked form me in a similar situation.
I hope I gave you some ideas.
I have a large windows application.
Recently when I make any change in the source code and run the project normally with or without debug, the changes are not made.
I tried to rebuild it, and everything goes fine,
now every change I made to the source code I have to rebuild the project then run it so that the changes are taking effect.
also I can't debug until I rebuild the solution.
my project is attached to source safe control.
any help is appreciated.
You frequently see this happen when a project gets deselected from the "Current Build Configuration" Dialog in visual studio. Try checking there to see if your project is unchecked. I think you can get to that menu by clicking the dropdown that says Debug/Release, and clicking manage/edit.
This is an old question but I happened to face a similar challenge. Well, for the benefit of someone who may experience the same here is how my problem was solved. I had a multi-project solution where some project depended on the source code from the other projects. Just before giving up and continue with the rebuild thing, I decided to check on the Build Dependencies=>Project Dependencies(Right-Click on the project). I found that the problematic code was from a Class Library that was not part of the dependencies(Unchecked). When I Included the project in the dependencies my problem vanished into thin air.
If you are referencing a .dll whose code is in another project you will need to build the project before the changes are reflected even if both projects are in same solution. sadly there is no running away from it.
Go to your configuration Manager and make sure build checkbox is selected for your project.
other thing you can try is:
Go to tools > Options>> A window will pop up> Under Project and Solutions > select Build and Run
Make sure Before building is set to Save all changes
(Copied from answer by amit dayama at https://stackoverflow.com/a/32820701/3195477)
I have faced the same problem because I have done some unsafe modifications upon the project names and have used find/replace upon the solution. Which resulted in a hidden exception in the android manifest file and exactly at the package name.
I avoid all types of headaches, I have created a new blank project with the desired name and namespaces and then moved the functional files, resource files and then modified static files like manifest and so on.
Never use unsafe method for project data configuration & modification