Thanks to Rangers' tutorials, papers, and Powerpoints, and my encouragement, my group recently started using TFS. Following your tutorials, we are using branching (underway) and merging (in the early stages). At the same time, our main project is up to 27 projects of source code, and has grown fragile and difficult to install. There's really no reason to compile all that source code everytime, either. We want to move more fully to referencing .dll's instead, but I want to get it right the first time, so I seek your wisdom.
In the Ranger's tutorials, I observed that they included folders /MAIN/Src, /MAIN/Docs, and /MAIN/Bin. The use of /MAIN/Src is obvious, but I have questions about how you use /MAIN/Bin. Other than including it as a folder your tutorials did not use it.
1. When you compile, do you use a post-build event to copy the .dll to /MAIN/Bin (or /DEV3/Bin if you happen to be in that branch)?
2. Do you have /MAIN/Bin/Debug and /MAIN/Bin/Release, or do you simply have /MAIN/Bin/*.dll which means the last version in wins?
3. If you use /MAIN/Bin/Debug and /MAIN/Bin/Release, do other projects reference the specific dll of interest, or is referencing smart enough to reference the correct version according to that project's version?
4. We are on VS2010, TFS 2010 and Framework 4.0. I want to upgrade ASAP. Do VS2012, TFS 2012 and Framework 4.5 affect the answers to the above in anyway?
Any other thoughts you may have or references that come to mind would be helpful. Might the Rangers or anyone else have tutorials that make active use of /MAIN/Bin, for example?
Don S. (originally sent to a Ranger, but worth a broader discussion)