Visual Source Safe - Removing files from web projects

Question

I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible.

1. Currently our team has a VSS database where our projects are stored.
2. Developers grab the code and place on their localhost machine and develop locally.
3. Designated developer grabs latest version and pushes to development server.

The problem is, when a file is removed from the project (by deleting it in VS2008) then the next time another developer (not the one who deleted it) checks in, it prompts them to check in those deleted files because they still have a copy on their local machine.

Is there a way around this? To have VSS instruct the client machine to remove these files and not prompt them to check back in? What is the preferred approach for this?

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Edit Note(s):

1. I agree SVN is better than VSS
2. I agree Web Application project is better than Web Site project
3. Problem: This same thing happens with files which are removed from class libraries.

Answer 1

You number one way around this is to stop using web site projects. Web Site Projects cause visual studio to automatically add anything it finds in the project path to the project.

Instead, move to Web Application Projects which don't have this behavior problem.

Web Site projects are good for single person developments.

UPDATE:

VB shops from the days gone past had similiar issues in that whatever they had installed affected the build process. You might take a page from their playbook and have a "clean" build machine. Prior to doing a deployment you would delete all of the project folders, then do a get latest. This way you would be sure that the only thing deployed is what you have in source control.

Incidentally, this is also how the TFS Build server works. It deletes the workspace, then creates a new one and downloads the necessary project files.

Further, you might consider using something like Cruise Control to handle builds.

Answer 2

Maybe the dev should take care to only check in or add things that they have been working on. Its kind of sloppy if they are adding things that they were not even using.

Answer 3

Your best solution would be to switch to a better version control system, like SVN.

At my job we recently acquired a project from an outsourcing company who did use VSS as their version control. We were able to import all of the change history into SVN from VSS, and get up and running pretty quickly with SVN at that point.

And with SVN, you can set up ignores for files and folders, so the files in your web projects dont get put into SVN and the ignore attributes are checked out onto each developer's machine

I believe we used VSSMigrate to do the migration to SVN http://www.poweradmin.com/sourcecode/vssmigrate.aspx

Answer 4

VSS is an awful versioning system and you should switch to SVN but that's got nothing to do with the crux of the problem. The project file contains references to what files are actually part of the project. If the visual studio project isn't checked in along with the changes to it, theres no way for any other developer to be fully updated hence queries to delete files when they grab the latest from VSS. From there you've got multiple choices...

1. Make the vbproj part of the repository. Any project level changes will be part of the commit and other developers can be notified. Problem here is it's also going to be on the dev server. Ideally you could use near the same process to deploy to dev as you would to deploy as release. This leads into the other way...

2. SVN gives you hooks for almost all major events, where hooks are literally just a properly named batch file / exe. For your purposes, you could use a post-commit hook to push the appropriate files, say via ftp, to the server on every commit. File problems solved, and more importantly closer towards the concept of continuous integration.

Answer 5

Something you may want to consider doing:

1. Get Latest (Recursive)
2. Check In ...

Its a manual process, but it may give you the desired result, plus if VS talks about deleted files, you know they should be deleted from the local machine in step 1.