3

On occasion I telecommute and need to work on the project files on my box at the office via my laptop. I bounce back and forth between two methods of doing this:

  1. I remote into the machine at my office and work on the instance of Visual Studio on that machine through RDP.
  2. I have the folder containing the solution files set up as a network share and load the solution on my local (laptop) install of Visual studio

These options are far from perfect. Loading the solution via network share makes for a responsive experience unless VS needs to read/write files, which happens with more actions than one might realize. The RDP method avoids the network latency of reading and writing files, but makes for a laggy experience, plus I have to reconfigure VS's layout everytime I log in to accommodate a single monitor.

What I'd like to do is continue to work on my local/laptop copy of VS but figure out a way to speed it up substantially. For a variety of reasons, I do not want to have to commit to and pull from source control to share across machines.

Any suggestions on how to speed up working with Visual Studio when loading remote project files?

joelmdev
  • 11,083
  • 10
  • 65
  • 89
  • Do you use source control? – Chris Schiffhauer Oct 24 '13 at 18:08
  • Yes, but as I specified, I don't want to have to commit my entire working directory everytime I work remotely. It would be highly preferable if I could figure out a faster way to make the filesystem available remotely. Perhaps a cloud solution? – joelmdev Oct 24 '13 at 18:12
  • For my personal projects, which are not in TFS, I use Dropbox. Complete undo and revision history which do not count toward my quota. – Chris Schiffhauer Oct 24 '13 at 18:43
  • Offer that up as an answer and I'll choose it. I've been a bit of a luddite regarding folder sync services. Dropbox was easy to get going and is working great. Someone also recommended Google Drive... – joelmdev Oct 24 '13 at 20:07

1 Answers1

3

Storing your local files under a Dropbox installation can help with synchronizing your files, but it comes with a couple caveats:

  1. On each machine that you synchronize, you must be able to store the files under your /Dropbox directory. This may be feasible on your laptop but not on your office box, for example.

  2. Dropbox synchronizes at its own casual pace. This is most noticeable on its initial sync, but also imposes a short delay on subsequent synchronizations. When you open your laptop at home, you'll need to keep an eye on the taskbar icon to ensure it is "up to date" before you begin working.

Given those caveats, I love using Dropbox for my personal projects for a couple reasons:

  1. Since I don't use source control on those projects, it is relatively easy to overwrite something you want to keep. Dropbox gives you fast access to your entire revision history, allowing you to roll back whenever needed. This does not count against my free quota.

  2. Even when I delete or remove files, Dropbox continues to store them and allows me, years later, to undelete and recover them. Again, all of this happens without impacting my free quota.

As the OP mentioned in the question's comments, Google Drive offers a solution similar to Dropbox.

Chris Schiffhauer
  • 17,102
  • 15
  • 79
  • 88
  • This is working great! I even created junctions to the original directory locations so IIS and Git are none the wiser, eg: `>mklink /J C:\my\original\project\path C:\my\dropbox\folder` – joelmdev Oct 25 '13 at 20:39