Moving back to .NET

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 14:29:33 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 03:00:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>> I, for one, was very excited when I found out that you could 
>> actually run VS builds from the command line rather than 
>> having to open up VS. And at my last job, I redid our build 
>> stuff so that we used cmake to generate the build stuff for 
>> both Linux and Windows so that we didn't have two build 
>> systems to maintain, and with that, the _only_ reason that I 
>> ever had to open up VS was to debug on Windows. It was great.
>>
>> Unfortunately, at my current job, we're entirely Windows, so 
>> everything's a huge mess in VS rather than using cmake, and 
>> most of the devs are totally Windows devs, so they'd probably 
>> freak out at the idea that the .vcproj files are generated, 
>> and you don't edit any settings inside of VS. So, there's no 
>> way that I'm going to get the beauty of cmake again here. I'm 
>> forced to open up VS more - and we're using the muck that is 
>> TFS, which pretty much requires opening up VS to manage source 
>> control (though the TFS power tools help).
>
> TFS has a CLI client. Why would you automate builds if you 
> can't automate getting fresh sources from source control?

I don't know what you mean by automating in this context. I'm not 
automating anything. This is all stuff that I'm doing as I 
develop, not stuff dealing with nightly builds or anything like 
that. Do you mean build from the command line? I did that at my 
previous job where we were using cmake and had made the directory 
structure very neat, and all of the VS stuff was separate from 
the actual code, since we didn't build in the source directories, 
but at my current job, everything was set up with VS by folks who 
use VS for everything, and the directory structure is a complete 
mess, making doing stuff from the command line a lot messier than 
it should be. I have done some TFS stuff from the command line 
but not a lot, since I'm stuck having the GUI open anyway, and I 
tend to touch TFS with kid gloves, because it seems to behave 
badly in general, and I have to be really careful that I don't do 
something like commit code from multiple branches at the same 
time or merge stuff badly.

What I really want to do is use git-tfs (and maybe even use that 
in an attempt to convince folks to switch to git from TFS), but 
for some reason, it doesn't work correctly with our repos - it 
doesn't pull in a lot of the files, making it unusable. The sad 
thing is that when they chose TFS a while back (before I was 
working there), the lead dev was pushing for Mercurial, but the 
other folks didn't listen, and he lost (even though he had 
Mercurial up and running very quickly, and they took over a week 
to sort out TFS). So, we could have had decent source control, 
but we're stuck with TFS instead - probably because most of the 
devs involved are too Windows-centric. And given how messy the 
TFS branching stuff is (e.g. it doesn't retain history when 
merging), I bet that using git or mercurial would save our build 
guy a ton of time, but he just wants to use TFS and thinks that 
it's great (probably because it's what he's used to, and it's 
from MS).

- Jonathan M Davis