Importing and Upgrading Projects

by Huw Collingbourne

Import existing Rails projects or older Steel solutions...

Thursday 6 July 2006.

Importing and Upgrading Projects

Note: applies to Steel 0.7 and later

Use the Project Importer to load up your Rails and Ruby projects. The Project Importer creates a new target directory and copies into it the directories and files from the original (source) project. It creates a Visual Studio solution and displays the files and directories in the Solution Explorer. The original files and directories are left unchanged.

How To Import A Project

1. Select File, New Project. In the New Project Dialog select the Import Project icon.
2. Enter a name for the new project and optionally browse to find an empty directory.
3. You may optionally select ‘Create directory for solution’
4. Click OK. You can now browse to find the folder containing the existing project which you wish to import.

: Browse to locate the top level directory of the Rails or Steel project you wish to import

5. Select the top level directory of the original project and click OK

Steel will now copy the entire directory structure and all the files it contains to the location of the new project (that is, the location which you selected In Step 2 above.

Notes
1) We recommend that you always create a new directory for an imported project. We caution against attempting to copy files into a directory which already contains source files. The project importer will overwrite any similarly named files and directories in the target directory.

2) The ‘top level’ directory of your existing Rails project (that is, the one you import from) will normally be the directory which ‘names’ the project (e.g. \Blog) and which contains various subdirectories such as \app, \components, \config and so on. The Importer copies all the files in a Rails project into the new target directory. It will not make any changes to the database or configuration files.

3) If you have created solution files using previous versions of Steel, you may find that the old solution files do not display correctly in the Solution Explorer. Use the Project Importer to convert them for use with the latest version of Steel.

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Importing and Upgrading Projects
13 December 2006, by Roy

You’re missing a pretty critical feature — the ability to create a project for an existing directory structure WITHOUT doing an import. I tried to work around this by doing an import and then copying the .sln file you created back to the original directory, but that royally messed up my source code control (because you copied all of the SSC control files as well as the project files), forcing me to delete everything and get a completely new tree from the SSC server. Fortunately, I had already checked in all my recent changes, so I didn’t lose anything.
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- Importing and Upgrading Projects
  14 December 2006
  
  You are right ...
  
  I think we missed the obvious here. It’s really pretty simple to create a solution file without doing any copying.
  
  I’ll add it to my task list - should be able to get it in for the main release.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Dermot
  
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Importing and Upgrading Projects
14 September 2006, by Chemica

Excellent piece of software!

It’s a revelation to be able to use my favourite IDE and my favourite language together. As with projects like Ruby.NET, people like you are really blurring the lines between different technologies. Have you asked for funding from Microsoft yet? ;^)

I had a hiccup when importing an online music shop project. I was told that it wasn’t compatible due to an illegal ’&’ character.

Handily, it gave the project filename and line number. It turned out that some test MP3s included with the project used ’&’ in the filenames... Removing them cleared the error.

Sounds like something a little character escaping would fix.

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- Importing and Upgrading Projects
  14 September 2006, by Chemica
  
  Additionally to the above, if you attempt to use the newly imported project directly after importing, VS will blankly refulse to let you. It’s only on ditching the solution and attempting to reload the project that you get the error.
  
  Hopefully this’ll save someone else a few minutes of hair tearing.
  
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- Importing and Upgrading Projects
  17 September 2006, by Dermot
  
  I’ve tracked this one down. It’s because an & is an XML character and so will cause trouble if it’s put in to the VS project file (which is XML based) in an unescaped way. However, escaping it wont work because that will screw up the filename.
  
  So the solution is to reject files with ampersand in them and report the fact.
  
  We’ll fix this in the next release.
  
  Dermot
  
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