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Installing Devforce without Visual Studio

Printed From: IdeaBlade
Category: DevForce
Forum Name: DevForce 2010
Forum Discription: For .NET 4.0
URL: http://www.ideablade.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=3588
Printed Date: 06-Jun-2025 at 12:41am


Topic: Installing Devforce without Visual Studio
Posted By: JohnBloom
Subject: Installing Devforce without Visual Studio
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 1:23pm
Is it possible to install Devforce without installing Visual Studio? 

We have switched to nunit for testing so we no longer need MsTest. With the recent release of "Windows 7 SDK and .Net 4" in May of last year we can install MsBuild separate from Visual Studio. With those developments we no longer need a copy of Visual Studio on our build server. However, DevForce still requires that VS be installed in order to run the installer. Is there an SDK like installer similar to what MS does? Something that will put the dlls in the GAC but will not need to coordinate with VS? 

I was really happy to get VS uninstalled from our build server in order to make our build server that much simpler in case we need to reproduce it from scratch or if a new developer needs to maintain it. Now I am going to have to install VS just so I can update to the next version of DevForce!

Is there a solution for this?

PS IMO nuget is the best option of all. 




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-John Bloom


Replies:
Posted By: sbelini
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 1:36pm
Hi John,
 
Visual Studio is a requirement for the current installation of DevForce 2010.
 
However, you don't really need to install DevForce either. (assuming your projects don't expect to find DevForce assemblies in the GAC, but rather in a local folder)
In addition, as long as you are not regenerating your models, you won't have any licensing issues.
 
Silvio.
 

Posted By: JohnBloom
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 1:57pm
That would work awesome. Does Cocktail need the libraries to be in the GAC?

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-John Bloom

Posted By: sbelini
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 2:10pm
I believe Cocktail does rely on DevForce being on the GAC, but since it's open source, you could simply update it to reference them locally too.

Posted By: JohnBloom
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 2:20pm
Yes but then I lose the magic and ease of nuget and thus create a lot of work for myself because I am too stubborn to put VS on my build machine. BAH! I will have to think about this one. Maybe I will just deploy them to the GAC myself. :)

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-John Bloom

Posted By: mgood
Date Posted: 20-Aug-2012 at 6:16pm
Originally posted by JohnBloom

That would work awesome. Does Cocktail need the libraries to be in the GAC?
No, it doesn't.

Posted By: JohnBloom
Date Posted: 21-Aug-2012 at 6:57am
Ok, this is just to confirm that putting the libraries into our svn repository and referencing them there does not violate any licensing agreement. And that it should work fine with Cocktail. (I am guessing that Cocktail relies on copy local being set to true?)

This would make updating to the latest dlls easier since I wouldnt have to send out an email and get everybody to upgrade their machines. Also it will help a ton with backwards compatibility. As of right now if I want to check out code from last week the code wont work because my version of DevForce is different. 

This will also set us up perfect if/when you guys move to nuget for your distribution.

I am not sure how you would be able to track how many users are checking out the code, though. We are a very ethical company so it wont be an issue I am just curious how that would work for all cases. 




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-John Bloom

Posted By: JohnBloom
Date Posted: 21-Aug-2012 at 11:27am
Everything is switched over to looking at a folder in our repository for the libs. It worked fine. 

I had to add a newer version of System.Runtime.Serialization to the GAC on our build machine but I guess I could have added that to the project as well. Not sure why I had to do that but again I like to mention all of my steps. 

Also if you have DevForce installed and you set the "specific version" attribute to false on the reference it will switch the dlls to the installed ones rather than the ones that were referenced from the folder.




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-John Bloom

Posted By: mgood
Date Posted: 21-Aug-2012 at 4:28pm
If you don't have things in the GAC, than copy local needs to be true, so the assembly gets deployed and found at runtime. That is for WPF. Silverlight doesn't have a GAC, so copy local needs to be true in order for the assembly to end up in the XAP.
 
How .NET resolves an assembly is documented. Just google for assembly binding. DevForce and Cocktail don't do anything different.
 
Yes, Visual Studio acts up if you reference an assembly from your solution folder and it also finds the same version of the assembly in the GAC. If you set specific version to false, it falls back to the GAC. In my opinion it's a bug, but unlikely to be fixed.
 


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