Project debugging issues

[szlamany]

Although this is happening in a web project, it's kind of just a VB.Net solution/project problem.

I've been carrying along for quite a few years a web project that was never made into a proper "solution". Especially as versions of the IDE moved along and the VS web project world kept changing.

At any rate, this web project has an additional VB Project for a reporting tool - that I distribute as a .DLL to my clients (on their web servers), but sits as a nice "second" project within this set of web folders.

I keep this whole mess on my OneDrive - so it's shared between an old Win7 workstation and a newer Win10 Surface Pro.

The Surface Pro has never been able to "re-build" the second "reporting tool" project. Whenever I needed to make changes, I would go to the old Win7 machine and work the reporting code over and re-build the whole solution there and get a nice new .DLL for release.

Long story short, I just broke the Win7 machine - moved my OneDrive folder to different drive letter and now I cannot re-build the reporting tool project. The code is stale and the debugger is giving me the message posted below. I have removed and re-added the secondary project - nothing seems to be getting me past this.

I need to debug and then subsequently compile this secondary project.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - thanks!

[szlamany]

Seems I have to manually copy the .DLL from the sub-project's BIN folder to the main web app BIN folder.

I see no easy way to turn this on in the IDE. Seems there are POST-COMPILE "cmd" actions you can load up - I guess I could copy the .DLL to the upper level BIN. Wonder if this was an option in earlier web app solutions, or maybe an option in a more formally setup web solution.

[bmwpete]

Have you tried setting the build output folder for the project who's .DLL you want to copy, to that of the folder of the 'Main' app.

[szlamany]

Right now, on the Surface Pro, it's set to ..\Bin\ and that refers to AWC\ACSReport\Bin

I want it to go intp AWC\Bin

How do I "notate" that location without using the actual C: drive, since this is OneDrive and different drive letters on different machines?

[PlausiblyDamp]

Right now, on the Surface Pro, it's set to ..\Bin\ and that refers to AWC\ACSReport\Bin

I want it to go intp AWC\Bin

How do I "notate" that location without using the actual C: drive, since this is OneDrive and different drive letters on different machines?

If you look into the project propertis, on the "Compile" tab there is an entry for the build output path, change this to where you want the output to be.

You should be able to use a relative path, so something like "..\..\Bin" might do it.

Personally I would be wary of using OneDrive for an actively developed project, it will be replicating all of the bin and obj files as well as the source code - I wouldn't be surprised if it also creates issues with file locking and outdated files... Might be easier to use a real version control system - that way you stil lget to share code but you also have a real history and the ability to revert changes when things go wrong.

[szlamany]

I actively support clients from either the old Win7 machine (about to be replaced - what a job that's going to be) or the Surface (especially when I go remote). All my clients run the same exact code base, as I enhance "xyz" here, all clients get that same feature. I only do 4GL's - even back in VB6 days - same now in AJAX web world. I've got a standard routine I follow to archive and notate client release folders with dates and versioning and what not.

Covid 19 - last three features (in the past 2 days!)

1) Enhance email capability to also send a "text" message - using Regroup api - for a college in Texas doing online classes
2) Enhance report writer tool - simple signature printing logic - enhanced to handle "student" images, one per page (for graduates - same college)
3) Add "Tele-Health session" check box for a social worker software, to support state reporting requirements in Connecticut for mental health reimbursements (we added 4 new CPT codes!). At least that only took 5 minutes - the true benefits of a 4GL

been a crazy few weeks.