[RESOLVED] TFS 2012 and Visual Basic 6.0?

[MrNorth]

Hi!

I have been assigned to do some changes in a VB6 + ASP (interdev) project. The whole development environment is in a virtual machine running Windows Server 2003.

Previously, they used sourcesafe locally, but a few months ago, they disbanded the sourcesafe repository and moved everyting to a TFS 2012 server. How can I in some way manage my source code from this virtual machine? I don't have to integrate to the IDE since that is probably impossible, but I need some way to quickly check in/out, compare, merge etc from this virtual dev machine.

I asked around, and no one seems to care about this, or thought about it when they disbanded SS (which was probably for the best.

One idea I have is to checkout the code from my local client where I have VS2012, then put it in a c:\VB6Projects folder, then map this path from within the VMware, and run the vbp-projects from this mapped path? Not sure if it is a good idea or not, but that is what I have in mind?

Any ideas?

/H

[Elroy]

Oh gosh, I once wrote a VB add-in that did precisely that. It used the Read-Only bit in the directory entry of the files. Let me see if I can still find it. It was back in 1997-1998, so it's probably VB4 or VB5. Not positive it'd work with VB6, but I sure don't mind putting it out here if I can find it. I'll let you know.

[RobDog888]

There are several TFS API's and dlls you can use to automate check in and out of code etc but its something that you need to have running perfectly as you are interacting with your code repository.

Check out my C# and TFS thread here for some info you may be able to use to get you started
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...uctivity-Tools

[Elroy]

Wow, with greatest apologies, I can't find it. I found some remnants of it (a "CheckedOut" folder in some old source code folders), but I can't find the source code to the add in. I looked pretty deep too. It must have gotten away from me on some 5.25 floppy or something. Who knows.

Reaching back in the rusty memory-banks, I can give you some pointers on how I did it. You can write VB6 add-ins that fire events when various things happen, such as viewing a form or opening the source code for a form, module, class module, user control, etc. I specifically remember just using the read-write/read-only flag of the actual file's directory entry. If it was read-only, a message popped up, notifying the programmer that someone else had the file open, and that they shouldn't open it. This was a single VBP project with something on the order of 200 separate modules. With that add-in, several programmers could be working on the master copy of the source, and not step on each other. There was also that "CheckedOut" folder with a little text file in it that kept track of who had what checked out. That way, the message box could tell one programmer what other programmer had their module checked out (possibly walking over to their machine and closing it, if they were at lunch).

It was a simple and elegant solution that worked well for us. The only downside I remember was that, someone who crashed the VB IDE would leave their files checked out. So, every morning, we had a utility that turned off all the read-only flags of the source files. I believe, the add-in was smart enough to clean it up if it was the same programmer (i.e., computer) trying to check out the module for a second time without checking it back in for the first time.

It was an elegant solution that worked well for us. And just as an FYI, we tried Source Safe and NEVER found that it could satisfactorily and elegantly do what we wanted.

[MrNorth]

Hi!

Thanks for all the assistance. I did manage to solve it by installing VS2010 shell and this tool https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.mic...9-d3937d3d88d6

After removing old source safe settings files and reloading the project, I got tfs integration in VB6. Amazing.

Sadl this was not possible to do with Interdev, so that was retired and now I use the VS2010 Shell along with Notepad++ for the asp and js files.

Thanks
Henrik

[RobDog888]

No problem, glad to have helped