Develop Reference

How to embed EDMX in a Code First assembly?

We're using Code First in EF6.1 - our model is over 300+ tables now and startup time is ridiculous. We've tried pregenerating views already but it didn't help much, it's the model compilation in the Code First pipeline that takes most of the time.
We're going to try using the Database / Model First approach for initializing the context by using an entity connection string with metadata links to CSDL, SSDL and MDL files, instead of a direct SQL connection. This would be our ideal process:
After the project containing the Code First model is compiled, a post-build task runs that generates an EDMX file from our DbContext, splits it into component CSDL, SSDL and MDL files, and embeds these files in the assembly as resources
When we create a context via our own factory, we wrap the original SQL connection string in an EntityConnectionStringBuilder, with the Metadata property pointing to the embedded resources, and use the builders connection string to initialize the DbContext
Initial testing shows an ~80% improvement in startup time - the tricky part here is doing the post-build resource embedding in step 1!
Can anyone provide any clues as to how step 1 could be done in MSBuild? Is there an alternative strategy that would work as well? Basically we want a zero-maintenance solution so that developers don't have to manually do anything other than build their code, with no special deployment considerations either.
EDIT:
We ended up using a new, separate class library project that references the project containing the Code First model. This project contains a T4 template that writes the EDMX from the DbContext into memory, then saves the component parts into project files that are already marked as embedded resources, so we get source control as well.
The build order guarantees that the resources will always be up to date, and the entity connection string references this resources assembly at runtime. The MSBuild integration was done by using the T4 MSBuild integration targets so that the template always runs during a build of the project.

You should certainly be able to do this with MSBuild. You will have to pick up a little bit of build script, but shouldn't be too bad.
How are you doing it now? Do you have a console application that you run to generate the edmx? It sounds like you have already done the hard part -- integrating with MSBuild should be easy. I will assume that you do, and go from there.
btw: One thing to know up front is that you .csproj files are MSBuild scripts, so any custom MSBuild scripting can go into those csproj files.
In order of increasing complexity, you could:
Add an "After build" event to your project that executes your console app. This option does not require any MSBuild script -- you just set up an after build event in the project options. It will always run, though. (I don't think you can make a post-build event dependent on configuration), so it could slow down your compile times.
You could use the Exec task in MSBuild to execute your console application. This will require a little editing of your csproj file, but you can make it conditional if you need to. Here's a link to the Exec task: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x8zx72cd.aspx If you put it in a target named "AfterBuild", it will automatically execute after your build has completed.
You could write your own build task -- this is a c# class that will be loaded and executed during build. This is the most sophisticated way to do it, but it also gives you the most control: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msbuild/archive/2006/01/21/515834.aspx
One of the nice things about the last option (custom build tasks), is that you can write error messages back into the build process. That should help with getting helpful information if the task fails, and if you use a build server, those messages should be picked up by the server in the same manner as any other build message.

Continuous integration and software versioning

I like the idea of automatically versioning my builds but I'm not sure what the right way is to get the AssemblyInfo.cs change back into source control (or should it not go into source control?). Is this something the CI server should be committing automatically for each build?
Using Bamboo at the moment.

We are using Teamcity as our CI server, and it comes with a feature called AssemblyInfo patcher
What this does, is temporarily add the teamcity build number in Assemblyinfo.cs, build generate the artifact and then revert the change. This way the generated artifact has the same version as the build number.
Source control can have the assemblyinfo.cs version entry as the current revision the developers are working on, with '*' as the build number. This can be updated after every release.
Edit 1:
Since you are using Bamboo, here is a link that describes one way of setting the build number in the generated artifact in bamboo, without having to check-in the AssemblyInfo.cs.

I'm sort of confused by your question. If you want the changes to persist you'll have to commit AssemblyInfo.cs after it gets edited by the build job. However, most build systems attempting to solve these problems do not persist the changes. They simply check out the file and edit the local version before kicking off the build task.

Whats a good approach for white labeling dll

Whats a good approach for white labeling dll and exe with visual studio?
In essence we want to be able to have the name of the dll and exe change based on the client that we are packaging the solution for, e.g.:
Instead of myCompany.exe and myCompany.db.dll, I would like yourComany.exe and yourComany.db.dll or acme.exe and acme.db.dll, etc
Edit:
Currently we are using a straight visual studio build process with a wix project to create an msi.

If the only justification for rebuilding it is to change the name, can you just use something generic in the first place? Imagine having to patch 50 identical DLLs, and build/deploying each one separately because they all must be named different things. Even if it's only for a few clients, I would hate to have to maintain that. Versioning could be a hassle too.
If you must do it, I would probably go with a build task (which can perform fairly advanced operations). You mention that you are "packaged the solution"; the viability of a build task would depend on how it is being packaged.
In response to your comment about naming the EXEs with client-specific names... My obvious suggestion there would be to have those applications contain as little code as possible.
The simplest build integration I can think of would be to create a post-build task which ran upon successful compilation in release mode. The task could then read a config file which defined the unique names, and copy the successfully built EXEs to an output directory.
Some of the operations can be accomplished just from the task config file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171466.
Alternatively, you might want to create a little application to do all the work for you, and just pass config switches to it.
For example, here is a little post-build command that I execute to minify my JavaScript/CSS upon successful build of a web application. The concept is similar:
build
execute an app (like msbuild.exe, or your custom build app)
pass data to the executable (like paths, switches, etc.)
executable writes the files out
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe
"$(ProjectDir)Properties\build\minify.xml"
/p:SourceLocation="$(ProjectDir)client"
/p:CssOutputFile="$(ProjectDir)client\final\final-full.css"
/p:JavaScriptOutputDirectory="$(ProjectDir)client\final"

You could use ILMerge in whatever post-build process you want on all your outputted assemblies (dll and exe), to create one-off customer-branded builds.
ilmerge /out:CustomerName.exe internalName.dll internalName.exe

I don't know that there is a good way to do this without actually building the project as XYZ company. You could try something like this which will give you the desired result BUT it will change the physical name of the assembly as well which may cause dependency problems.

Visual Studio Long wait before Starting to build

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.

.NET Dependency Management and Tagging/Branching

My company is having trouble figuring out the best way to manage our builds, releases, and branches... Our basic setup is we have 4 applications we maintain 2 WPF applications and 2 ASP.NET applications, all 4 of these applications share common libraries, so currently they are all in one folder /trunk/{app1, app2, app3, app4}.
This makes it very hard to branch/tag a single application because you are branching all 4 at the same time, so we would like to separate it out into something like {app1,app2,app3,app4}/{trunk,tags,branches} but then we run into the issue of where to put the shared libraries?
We can't put the shared libraries as SVN externals because then when you branch/tag the branch is still referencing the trunk shared libs instead of having them branched as well.
Any tips? Ideas?
We are currently using svn and cruisecontrol.net.
EDIT: The shared libraries are changing often as of right now, which is why we can't use them as svn externals to trunk, because we might be changing them in the branch. So we can't use them as binary references.
Its also very hard to test and debug when the libraries are statically built instead of including the source.

I guess it all depends on how stable the shared libraries are. My preference would be for the shared libraries to be treated as their own project, built in CruiseControl like the others. Then the four main applications would have binary references to the shared libraries.
The primary advantage with this approach is the stability of the applications now that the shared libraries are static. A change to the libraries wouldn't affect the applications until they explicitly updated the binaries to the newer version. Branching brings the binary references with it. You won't have the situation where a seemingly innocuous change breaks the other three applications.

Can you clarify why you don't like branching all four applications at the same time?
This makes it very hard to branch/tag a single application because you are branching all 4 at the same time
I usually put all my projects directly under trunk as you are currently doing. Then when I create a release branch or a feature branch, I just ignore the other projects that get carried along. Remember, the copies are cheap, so they're not taking up space on your server.
To be specific, here's how I would lay out the source tree you've described:
trunk
WPF1
WPF2
ASP.NET 1
ASP.NET 2
lib1
lib2
branches
WPF1 v 1.0
WPF1
WPF2
ASP.NET 1
ASP.NET 2
lib1
lib2
WPF1 v 1.1
WPF1
WPF2
ASP.NET 1
ASP.NET 2
lib1
lib2
lib1 payment plan
WPF1
WPF2
ASP.NET 1
ASP.NET 2
lib1
lib2

We are kicking off an open source project to try and deal with this issue. If anyone is interested in commenting on it or contributing to it, it's at:
http://refix.codeplex.com

I agree with #Brian Frantz. There's no reason to not treat the shared libraries as their own project that is built daily and your projects take binary dependency on the daily builds.
But even if you want to keep them as a source dependency and build them with the app, why wouldn't the SVN externals approach work for you? When you branch particular app, there's no need to branch the shared library as well, unless you need a separate copy of it for that branch. But that means, it not a shared library anymore, right?

I've tried solving this problem several ways over the years, and I can honestly say there is no best solution.
My team is currently in a huge development phase and everyone basically needs to be working off of the latest and greatest of the shared libs at any given time. This being the case we have a folder on everyone's C: drive called SharedLibs\Latest that is automatically synced up with the latest development release of each of our shared libraries. Every project that should be drinking from the firehose has absolute file references to this folder. As people push out new versions of the shared libs, the individual projects end up picking them up transparently.
In addition to the latest folder, we have a SharedLibs\Releases folder which has a hierarchy of folders named for each version of each shared lib. As projects mature and get towards release candidate phase, the shared lib references are pointed to these stable folders.
The biggest downside to this is that this structure needs to be in place for any project to build. If someone wants to build an app 10 years from now, they will need this structure. It is important to note that these folders need to exist on the build/CI server as well.
Previous to doing this, each solution had a lib folder that was under source control containing the binaries. Each project owner was tasked with propagating new shared dlls. Since most people owned several projects, things often fell through the cracks for the projects that were still in the non-stable phase. Additionally TFS didn't seem to track changes to binary files that well. If TFS was better at tracking dlls we probably would have used a shared libs solution / project instead of the file system approach we are taking now.

Apache NPanday + Apache Maven Release
... might solve your problems
It gives you dependeny management (transitive resolving), strong versioning support, and automatic tagging/branching on 14+ version control systems, including SVN.
Give me a hint, if I should elaborate more.
I think there is no way you can avoid versioning and distributing your shared libs as separate artifacts, but Maven helps you alot doing that!
And you can allways do tricks to get it all opened in one Solution :-)
A sample workflow:
Dev 1 build A locally using Maven
Checks in sources
Build server builds A and deploys so-called SNAPSHOT-Versions to Repository Manager (e.g. Nexus)
Dev 2 two loads B, NPanday will automatically resolve the A-libs from the Repository Manager (No need to get the source and build)
Dev 1 wants to release A: Maven Release creates a branch or a tag with your source, finalizes the Version (removing SNAPSHOT) and deploys the artifacts to a Repository Manager.
Dev 2 can now upgrade B to use the final release of A (change entry in xml, or use VS-addin to do so)
Now Dev 2 can release B, again with automatic creation of tag or branch and deployment of built artifacts.
If you want to provide zipped packages as output from your build, Maven Assembly Plugin will help you do that.

You can use Apache/ IVY in standalone mode.
http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/latest-milestone/standalone.html
I need to emphasize "stand alone" mode. If you google for examples....you will find alot of (not standalone) ones.
Basically, IVY works on this premise.
You publish binaries (or any kind of file, but I'll say binaries from this point forward).....as little binary-packages.
Below is PSEUDO code, do not rely on my memory.
java.exe ivy.jar -publish MyBinaryPackageOne.xml --revision 1.2.3.4 (<< where the .xml refers to N number of files that make up the one package.))
"Package" simply means a group of files. You can include .dll and .xml and .pdb files in a package (what I do with a DotNet build of assemblies). Or whatever. IVY is file-type agnostic. If you want to put WordDocs up there you could, but sharepoint is better for documents.
As you make bug fixes to your code, you increment the revision.
java.exe ivy.jar -publish MyBinaryPackageOne.xml --revision 1.2.3.5
then later you can retrieve from IVY what you want.
java.exe ivy.jar -retrieve PackagesINeed.xml
PackagesINeed.xml would contain information about the packages you want.
something like
"I want version '1.2+ of the MyBinaryPackageOne"
(defined in xml)
As you build your framework binaries...you PUBLISH to IVY.
Then, as you develop and build your code...you RETRIEVE from IVY.
In a NUTSHELL, IVY is a repository for FILES (not source code).
Ivy then becomes the definitive source of your binaries.
None of the "Hey, Developer-Joe has the binaries we need" kind of bull-mess.
.......
Advantages:
1. You do NOT keep your binaries in source control. (and thus do not BLOAT your source control).
2. You have ONE definitive source for binaries.
3. Through xml configuration, you say which versions you need for a library.
(In the example above, if version 2 (2.0.0.0) of MyBinaryPackageOne is published to IVY (let's assume with breaking changes from 1.2.x.y)...then you are OK, because you defined in your retrieve (xml configuration file) .. .that you only want "1.2+". Thus your project will ignore anything 2+...unless you change the configuration package.
Advanced:
If you have a build machine (CruiseControl.NET for example)....you can write logic to publish your (newly built) binaries to IVY after each build.
(Which is what I do).
I use the SVN revision as the last number in the build number.
If my SVN revision was "3333", then I would run something like this:
java.exe ivy.jar -publish MyBinaryPackageOne.xml --revision 1.2.3.3333
Thus whenever retrieve the package for revision "1.2.3+" .... I'll get the latest build.
In this case, I would get version 1.2.3.3333 of the package.
It's sad that IVY was started in 2005 (well, that's the good news)...but that NUGET didn't come out til 2010? (2011?)
Microsoft was 5-6 years behind on this one, IMHO.
I would never go back to putting binaries in source control.
IVY is very good. It is time proven. It solves the problem of DEPENDENCY management.
Does it take a little bit of time to get comfortable with it?
Yep.
But it is worth it in the end.
My 2 cents.
.................
But idea #2 is
Learn how to use NUGET with a local (as in..local to your company) repository.
That is the about the same thing as IVY.
But having looked at NUGET, I still like IVY.