Visual Studio - Projects from Multiple Source Code Providers?

Question

Well, that should be a common problem. I hope one of you geniuses knows the solution!

The problem I'm trying to solve is this: we use a lot of code from different public sources and cannot easily support all of them in Visual Studio because they use different source code providers.

Ideally, you can simply add these projects to your own Visual Studio solutions, reference them in your own projects, and save them in real time by right-clicking on the project and choosing "get the latest ..." whenever you want.

However, since Visual Studio does not support multiple simultaneous source code providers, how are you going to maintain current project links? Right now, we are importing them into a separate place, and then copy / paste the source files into our own solutions folder. There must be a better way. If you know one, I would appreciate it.

Our in-house source control provider is Team Foundation Server.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This may seem simplistic, but it just takes place for binaries to reference your project. Do you really need to debug all the code from these third parties? I would only think that you would need to do this if there is a problem.

If you really need to do this, I would start using scripts and run each script using cvs, subversion, git, etc. command line utilities. any version control repositories. Then, once you have these separate scripts, you can write a batch file to put them all together. After that, you can write the tfs command to import this code into the TFS repository.

This simplifies this, I know, but your question is large in scope. I advise you to start a small (individual repo) and develop scripts and master scripts.