I developed and have been following a development changes (aka Change Request / CR) methodology for all my web development for many years which includes the following procedural constraints:
- Version control Trunk equals Production at all times except for small windows during production releases.
- Development code is stored in its own independent directory structure and contain all files necessary for deployment of the changes to dev, test or production. This includes all DB schema and web resources in that change set.
- Each CR directory will NOT contain any files that are not being modified in the change set.
- In a team based environment, these change set directories would be branches in version control so all team members could see all open changes and also enable automated validation / CI.
- Each Change is named with a unique identifier like a date/timestamp or a formal change identifier in an issue tracker like Jira.
When Deploying changes to dev, test or prod, the web directory can just be pushed over to the web server being tested by SCP/SFTP, sometimes using the cool WinSCP directory syncing tool.
When production release is complete and validated, files can be copied / merged to Version Control Trunk and the CR folder moved to an archive for future reference.
Now, I am now trying to get my head around how to maintain large web projects using Visual Studio whilst following my change set methodology and have hit a wall on how to make this work. It would be great to keep my changes separate but also be able to use Visual Studio to step through code to debug things when log based debugging is insufficient. The Web projects I am maintaining are massive.
Has anybody come across the ability in Visual Studio to have a Web Project based on two separate directory structures like WEB_BASE (containing the entire website) and CR1234 (containing the actively development code) and have Visual Studio use files by the following order of precedence: Use any files from CR1234 first and then WEB_BASE second, ignoring the duplicates in WEB_BASE?
Are there any other ways to keep track of the discrete changes required for change sets whilst using Visual Studio and minimizing the UI noise of scrolling through resources that you are not changing to find the files you are working on?