Visual Studio solutions - correct location for utility EXEs needed by your solution

Question

Is there a proper place in a Visual Studio solution for .exes required by your solution. For example I'm working on a tool now that needs VHDCreate.exe, ISOCreate.exe, OSClone.exe and other exes. What is the right way to include them in a solution? I've inherited a solution where they are just stuck inside a folder inside the business layer project of the solution.

I'm using Visual Studio 2010.

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 02 '12 at 18:37

2

I would suggest having a nicely organized tools folder at the level of the solution. Then you can use a solution folder to organize it separate from the rest of the projects.

answered Apr 02 '12 at 18:37

Daniel A. White

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Can that be incorporated into an installer easily? or does this only work well for XCopy type deployments? – BuddyJoe Apr 02 '12 at 18:41
oh i thought u were referring to builds... you really should have Merge Modules for your installs. – Daniel A. White Apr 02 '12 at 18:43
Make sure you mark them `Copy if newer` in the solution explorer. – John Alexiou Apr 02 '12 at 18:50

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 02 '12 at 18:59

This is with a native .dll but the concept is the same.

Add existing item to solution and pick any folder where binaries exist:

Add Existing

Select add as link from whatever folder outside solution you keep the binaries

Add as Link

In the solution explorer set it as Copy if newer.

Solution Explorer

The .exe or .dll will be copied to the build output folder if needed.

Output Folder

When the original .exe gets updated the build will pull the newer one in the output folder.

Nicholas Carey · Answer 3 · 2012-04-02T19:45:55.150

You might want to read Mike Roberts series, How to Set Up a .Net Development Tree. The way Visual Studio does it by default is essentially broken, as far as I'm concerned.

Single *.pdf: How to Set Up a .Net Development Tree

Fundamentally, your directory structure should look like this:

Meta/Development Root
Usually mapped to root of source control system.
- Solution
  One directory, contain your entire solution. Should be named to match the solution.
  - Solution.sln
    The solution file itself.
  - nant.build
    The nAnt build file for the solution.
  - lib
    The lib directory contains 3rd party assemblies/dlls that are referenced by the different projects in your solution. It is under source control. Project references should point here.
  - tools
    The tools directory contains all 3rd party tools required to build your solution. It, too, is under source control. The tools directory should contain the versions of nAnt, nUnit etc. used by your project — and your build scripts should reference these, rather than the version(s) installed on a developer's machine.
  - bin
    The bin directory contains the output of the build process for the solution. Each projects must be configured to point here.
    - debug
      debug build
    - release
      release build
  - obj
    In the ideal world, each project's obj would be pointed here as well as this has no place in the source tree. Sadly, Visual Studio doesn't offer an official way to do that (though, I'm told, VS can be hacked to do so if you're resourceful enough).
  - src
    The src directory is the root directory for the actual source code of your solution.
    - project1
      The directory for project1.
      - project.csproj`
        The project file.
      - *.cs, etc. files. The source files.
    - ...
    - project-n

How to structure individual projects is, I think, an entirely separate topic, but there should be, WRT to both the solution and the individual projects a correspondence between namespace and file system hierarchy. If a particular project requires a 3rd party assembly that is not to be available to other projects in the solution, an argument could be made for each such projects' directory to its own lib directory, but that scatters 3rd party assemblies across the source tree and so is not recommended.

Visual Studio solutions - correct location for utility EXEs needed by your solution

3 Answers3