Setting up an Isolated .NET Team Environment

[Guest]

Hi,

I've done a bit of reading on setting up an Isolated .NET environment for
each of my developers. We all run Windows XP Pro, IIS and have local
instances of SQL Server for development.

I have a few problems that I am trying to work around.

1) All our sites are created using virtual paths. If I am to adopt the
isolated model and develop on each developers machine, when you create
projects locally the web application is created in a subfolder to the web
root. This breaks all our images, javascript files and styles sheets links.

Is there any other solution other than to change the way we reference our
files, so we can then run and debug these projects locally? (These aren't
controls, just simple html tags).

2) I am trying to find a solution/structure on how to setup the developers
machine for the purpose of maintaining/developing the many websites we have.
The developer only needs to be able to work on one website at a time. I was
thinking along the lines of that the developer could check out the latest
version of the code to a directory and then run a script which would change
the home directory of http://localhost to be the project they wished to work
on.

thanks in advance
Ralph

 

[Joel Zinn]

On the image and other files situation situation: I assume that the images
and Jscript folders are subfolders of your web project? You have to be
careful how you create the path the those objects. For images, if you are
using an HTML image rather than a ASP.Net image, if you see it in VS.Net,
you probably have the path wrong to see it in a running app. It is usually
better to use the ASP.Net image, because it is smart enough to handle the
path situation. (This is particularly helpful if you are using multiple sub
folders and ASP.Net user controls.) On the JScript files, you just have to
be careful how you create the paths. What you may be doing is giving it a
virtual path that during run time actuall ends up back at the localhost root
rather than the root of the site you are working on. You may need to set
breakpoints at the place where you call the code and see what path is
actually being used. This will help you figure out how to set up your
virtual path info.

We have several developers working on several sites and they have no
problem. We use separate sites under the wwwroot (localhost) folder. We
use Visual SourceSafe and team members check in and out with no problem.
They also know to "get latest version".

There is a very good white paper on the Microsoft site:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...FamilyID=94FDB8C8-5A87-4545-AF75-6053F32C7ECA

Hope this helps...

 

[Guest]

Thanks Joel, I guess I was asking how do others handle the problem of using
virtual paths or web applications that have been built expecting that they
are going to be placed into the root? Particulary for things that aren't
server controlled like simple plain old img tags.

Do most people structure their projects so that old school HTML tags are all
relative so as to avoid this problem?