Application Structure/Vault Settings

chowell · Post by **chowell** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 6:01 am

Hi,

Looking for some advice on .Net application structure. We have a main solution called My.Main and this solution will be used to hold a reference to all other solutions (eg. My.Utilities). Currently when we change and build My.Utilities a new dll is created. In My.Menu we have the reference to My.Utilities set to copy local (true). So when the My.Menu solution is opened the dll reference is updated. The problem that we are running into with this application structure is that if there were 20 other solutions referencing My.Utilities, all of those solutions would have to be opened to get the dll change.

We've considered creating one main solution like My.Main and adding all other solutions like My.Utilities as projects in the one solution. The problem we foresee with this is that when we get 50 projects in the same solution the build time would be enormous. This brings us back to the seperate solution scenario.

Just wondering if someone could point us in the right direction. Is there a standard to follow when creating a .Net application? Is there anything we can do with vault settings that can help us keep dlls updated in all projects that reference them? Should dlls be added to vault?

Thanks

dan · Post by **dan** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 8:49 am

Maybe other folks out there have ideas or suggestions for how to deal with this, or perhaps asking the question in a Microsoft Visual Studio forum would yield some good answers. I'm pretty sure Vault doesn't really come into play in this scenario. It has the ability to store DLLs if you choose to go that route.

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:15 pm

We have 69 projects in a single VS solution which I open routinely in Visual Studio 2003 (about 250k lines of code). All but one of the projects is C#, so compile time really isn't a problem; it is around 55 seconds for a rebuild. Incremental builds can be much faster, depending on what was changed. The only real problems we have are the misc bugs in VS 2003 which hopefully will be fixed in SP1 later this week/month.

If that doesn't work for you, you could probably setup post-build operations in VS to copy the .dll to its destination(s). xcopy with the /U switch may help to automate things if you are handy with .bat files.