Searching for advices: Managing different builds of your plugin (VS2010)

Hi everybody!,

I have a little question about release&build managing in VS2010 (but I supose that will be the same for VS2008). I imagine that if you are coding a plugin and make different versions or releases you don't need to create a new project every time. I'm searching for a fast way to jump from an old release to a new one without manually copying all the files of the old project to the new one and increase the Assembly and/or File version number by one (Assembly Information window).

Is there any option to automate the process or to make it less painful?

Targets:

Avoid copying manually all the classes files.
Rename automatically the project and create a new folder with it: if I'm coding Plugin 0001, I want to copy and rename the project to Plugin 0002 (folders, assembly version,...)
If this is not the better solution or workflow, which are you using for your plugins?
Is Git the solution to this problem?

Best regards and thanks in advance.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Steve Baer on August 14, 2012 at 8:09am

Use build configurations and conditional compilation symbols for this. You can create new build configurations and then define new symbols in those configurations. This lets you place #if {symbol} #endif blocks around code that you want to only show up in certain configurations.

If you aren't using a version control system like svn or git, learn to. It is an incredibly useful tool and one that every person writing code should try to learn.

-Steve

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on August 17, 2012 at 1:03pm

I'm installing and using Github, is really nice and useful, but I haven't found any manual of good practices in Git. Indeed I'm learning reading tutorials and other resources, but looking at other people github repositories too. I've seen that people usually only use one branch in github, but that have no sense for me: if you modify the main structure of your code is not better to create a new branch to keep writing code in that direction? Perhaps I don't understand branch purpose or logic...

Any suggestion to read about?

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on August 14, 2012 at 8:22am

Thanks! I'm on it now. It looks really useful and everybody use it...because of that I've decided to learn about.

I'll read about conditional compilation symbols, thanks for the tip.

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on August 18, 2012 at 4:15am

I reply myself. Some resources I have found.