Toolkit and Visual Studio- Solutions/Project folder structure

[msteffke]

I'm  a long time Toolkit writer, but just now finally starting to compile and debug in Visual Studio.  Been compiling using command line all these years!   I have been using the "Next Steps" guide created by the toolkit committee some years back. 

  I'm still a little unsure about a Solution vs Project.    I see a solution can contain many projects.  I have a working test dll that is running inside of toolkit successfully, so now I am ready to start working on my real stuff.  I write code strictly for my company, my code might run at a couple of our plants.

Lets say I have 10 dll's that run inside of Creo.    Should I have 1 solution that contains 10 projects.  Or have 10 solutions with 1 project in them ???

  Thanks for any advice!

[Eike_Hauptmann]

We use 1 Solution per Product and you need multiple projects inside of them.

So for example:

 - Model Processor (Our Product)

   - Model Processor DLL for 64 bit Creo 2

   - Model Processor DLL for 32 bit Creo 2

   - Model Processor DLL for 64 bit Creo 3

   ...

   - Model Processor Unit Tests

   - Model Processor Helpfiles (we don't have that anymore, now use "Help and Manual" for it)

Inside a solution the projects can share code easyly. Between solutions thats a little bit (not much) more complicated. Also you can build test projects for Unit tests, a project for helpfile compilation, ... and make dependend project compilations inside the solution. So if you need prebuild libs for stuff like curl, duktape, sqlite, ... . Thats are project stuff inside the solution and get automatically inside your build queue. 

There was an interesting talk with J. D. Felinks to this 2 or 3 years ago about continuus delivery and autmatic build queues with Jenkins, Bugtracking (Redmine, Jira, ...) and mvn or another solutions.

Br,

Eike

[Eike_Hauptmann]

Oh one more thing : )

If you use git or svn for code savety than it is much easier to share single Products with other developers if you build solutions. So you don't need every developer to get the complete code for all company projects. Thats a huge advantage for the company.

Also if sometimes things get developed twice. But I bet that this also happened if any code get shared because no one knows whats inside the deep of the other code.

Br,

Eike

[msteffke]

Thanks Eike, Thats good insight that gets me going in the right direction.