Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
It is quite possible that this issue is entirely down to some odd aspect of the setup of the Virtual Machine I'm developing on at the moment, but recently I've experienced quite a few hangs when loading Sitecore solutions. Starting up Visual Studio to be greeted with a never ending progress bar:
A bit of a change of tack this week. Rather than writing about something I've been doing, I'd like to ask for your ideas on something I've been thinking about. This issue is way to complex to compress into a tweet to ask on Twitter, and it seems too opinion based to be asked on Stack Overflow. So I'll ask it here, in the hope that some of you clever people might offer your opinions. Comment below, tweet me, write blog posts in response, send carrier pigeons or whatever. All thoughts appreciated...
So here's what I'm thinking about: How do you set up your projects for development?
NuGet is a really useful tool for managing external references for your .Net projects. It's also a tool that the Sitecore community are making good use of, with loads of useful Sitecore extensions available as packages. Plus it's been extended with the ability to deploy things into a Sitecore instance. Another potential use in Sitecore projects (that I've not found much discussion of) is for your references to the Sitecore DLLs themselves. I've been experimenting with this on some of my projects, so thought I'd write down what I've tried.
A neat little trick I discovered recently, and promptly forgot to share is that you can make use of Visual Studio's diff window for any pair of files, without the need for a project or solution. All you need is a little command line trickery.
Recently I attended the developer upgrade training course for Sitecore 7, which was an interesting (and busy!) day learning about what's been changing in Sitecore in recent releases. But in amongst all that information, there was an interesting admission – Sitecore's training has moved away from the "stick your Visual Studio Solution in the Sitecore website folder" model that had jarred with me when I first did their training.
I didn't really like this model when it was taught at the original Sitecore training I attended a few years back. Before Sitecore I had done all my development work with my solution folders outside of the IIS sites. So the model I adopted for development when I started my first real project made use of MSBuild instead. (Rather than the Visual Studio Publishing wizard that the latest training discusses) So I thought I'd write down a few of the things I'd tried for setting up solutions, in case these of use to anyone else...
