Opening Visual Studio Solution from Server Explorer

Question

I don't know if this is possible, but I am trying to open a Visual Studio 2010 solution that is on a remote server from in Visual Studio. The project I am on is using Kentico CMS and we would like to be able to sync changes made to the hosted site (on the server) using TFS and Visual Studio as well as changes made via the Kentico CMS Desk portal. I haven't found anything on the Visual Studio or Kentico dev site or in the documentation. Whether or not this is possible, or if there is a better way of achieving this goal, I would appreciate any insight you could give.

Answer 1

After talking with a couple developers who were a bit more familiar with Kentico, we eventually found a good solution to our problem. It's not perfect, but it will work for our purposes.

1. We had the Kentico administrator generate a new license code for Kentico for 'localhost'.
2. In Visual Studio, we pulled down one of the default Kentico projects from the server.
3. On the project properties, we set Use Dynamic Ports to false and chose a number to set the ports to.
4. Once the project was built and running, we could navigate to 'localhost:1501/[ProjectName]/[PageName (CMSDesk, Landing.aspx, etc.)]' to access the CMS Desk portal.
5. In the CMS Site Manager, navigate to Sites > (click the Edit button for the site) > Domain Aliases > New Domain Alias and set a new domain alias (the website you want to use when viewing the site (for us it was dev.[projectname].com). This allows other developers to log onto and use the pages via the domain alias when the project is on the server. Changes made on the localhost copy must be pushed to the server before they are visible.

Using the local copy, we could work with the web parts and sync changes to TFS. We still have to manually copy the project from our local machine to the server in order to deploy, but we are hoping to set up a build machine that will push the TFS build to the server on a regular basis, which shouldn't be especially difficult.

If we find any better way to achieve this goal, or find any potential problems, I will be sure to update.

Answer 2

I believe this system would help you accomplish syncing your development environment to a remote server.

http://www.kentico.com/Product/All-Features/Other-Modules/Staging-and-synchronization

You can check out what gets synced on this page:

http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html

Answer 3

The content staging is good for synchronizing changes made via the user interface.

For synchronizing changes in the file system (e.g. changes in the code files in Visual studio), you can use some third party tools to keep the folders up to date - i.e. Drop box or Google drive (but there are also other tools and utilities).