Adding an ASP.NET web site project to source control

After sucessfully migrating our web application from asp.net 1.1 to 2.0 and it actually building it was time to add it back to source control (visual source safe) and into a different visual source safe database to safely seperate the migrated asp.net 2.0 version from the asp.net 1.1 version.

Now this should have been as simple as 123. But again it was not to be easy as it should have been.

We selected the web site project in visual studio.net 2005 and right clicked and selected add project to source control and choose to add it to a visual source safe project within the the new visual source safe database. The web site project soon started checking in. This should have been the end of the story.....

Once all the files had been checked in we attempted to setup the web site project on a developers computer. We selected the option source control --> open from source control and selected the relevant visuals source safe project from the new visual source safe database. We were presented with an error message detailing that the visual source safe project did not contain any solution or project but if we were trying to open a web site project to press the help button. We press the help button and get a help topic documenting that the help topic we were looking for can not be found. Flipping great. Thinking it could be a problem with that developers installation of msdn we repeat the process on another developers computer. The same problem happens again. This is extremely bad news, the 1st time you really really want to read some help topic it can not be found (nooooooooooooo).

We looked in the visual source safe project and there was no solution or project file so we started looking at ways of adding one as we thought we may need one.

We could not work out how to add the solution file to source control as this is what seemed to be missing as there should not be a project file anymore (thank god that made mutli user development / branching a pain). Eventually a developer found a setting in visual studio.net 2005 which you had to tick to display the solution in the server explorer so that it could be checked into the visual source safe project (tools --> options --> projects and solutions --> always show solution).

At last we thought we had the answer. We recreated the web site project in visual source safe but when we tried to check the web site project out to two developers computers it would put the web site project into the my documents (/visual studio 2005 / projects) location rather than the webroot.

Still no closer to the solution and about 1/2 day had passed.

Eventually we find an article on google which advises us that we must use the option open website and then select from source control. At last we had worked out what we needed to do as well as recreating the web site project in visual source safe again.

I guess the help topic that we would could not locate would have told us that.