Visual Studio: Load a Project from a Remote Location

Question

With Visual Studio (2008), is it possible to load a project (to a solution) that exists on a remote location ?

Basically what I want to do is somehow "host" a VS Project online and then load this project to a solution from a remote location. Is this possible in some way?

This is so that I can keep integrity when loading my Utils Library (used in tons of projects) and I don't want copies of my project in different projects and all having different versions etc...

I know that a possible solution is to have the Utils Library project hosted in SVN and then the folder would sync to it directly, but is there any other way to do this (ie, something more direct) ?

Answer 1

Yes, if you can map a network drive to it, the you can open the files from the location in visual studio.

you can map network drives to ftp servers by entering "ftp://your-ftp-server" in the path box.

Like others have said though, it's not really recommended. VS reads/writes a lot more than just to edit the main project files, it does all kinds of other stuff, so your network traffic be higher than you really want.

Or you could look at dropbox. It comes with a explorer addin that keeps your local PC in sync with the server.

My recommendation would be to use source control like subversion though.

Answer 2

It is possible, but not recommended (you'd be better using some form of source control, be it SVN, or a shared source provider like Codeplex (for open source projects) or TFS Preview (for closed source projects)

Answer 3

Is it not simpler just to have the compiled dll referenced in each solution? The way you are proposing is going to open you to changes to the project for one solution causing problems in a bunch of other solutions, that you might not immediately see.

Better to have a version of the Utils dll referenced in each sub solution and you can then update that dll when necessary, and test at the same time.