Structuring Site/Solution

[Simon Harris]

Hi All,

I work in a team of three developers. 99% of our work is developing
'applications' for our organisations Intranet - mainly whats become known to
us as e-employee apps, such as sickness/holiday reporting/authrisation,
handling the new starter/leaver processes, etc...the list goes on.

Up to recently, we have been developing in 'classic' ASP, storing all apps
in subdirectories of there own.

We are now starting to develop using VS.Net...We want to get this as right
as we can from the start, hence the following Q's...

- Should the 'site' be one project, or one solution? Or should each app be a
project, or even solution of its own?
- How do we share code? (Previously shared functions etc using include
files) Is this where the global assembly cache comes into play? I've not had
much luck finding documentation about this - I guess 'sharing' code becomes
a whole lot more important now, thinking in terms of building reusable
classes/functions...etc!
- We also need away of sharing chunks of HTML for headers etc...Are ASCX
files the right way to go for this?

I guess the questions arose when we started to discuss when to do builds,
when to deploy from development to live servers etc...We would need to do
this individually, for each application, as we tend to develop apps that
way - One developer will work on one project for X weeks, and then test and
deploy.

Hope that makes sense! Look forward to any advice anyone may have.

Regards,
Simon.

 

[Patrice]

We used a single solution and a directory for each "module".

Developement is done using the isolated model (ie using IIS on the developer
machine). Once the source is checked in on the build server we have a batch
file that compiles the app as a DLL for each module. It allows to update
indivually each module (and we have also a common support DLLs for common
stuff).

Sharing is really easy. Use user controls for HTML fragments but you could
use just classes to share "pure" code...

Patrice