Opening a Visual Studio Solution from a Source Control Repository

Whether you are using a new machine that you have just setup, or a new developer is joining the project, the situation often comes up where a Visual Studio solution or project is already in source control and now you want to open it in Visual Studio and have all the source control bindings work properly.

This seems like such a simple task, but over the years I have seen people lose hours of productivity running into problems getting the bindings to work properly. Over the course of those years, I have found the following steps to work really well. I usually use SourceGear’s Vault product, but these general steps apply to just about any source control system that integrates with Visual Studio, including Visual SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server, and Ankh SVN.

You need to get the bindings to source control setup for a solution on your local development machine once, and then after that you can easily just click on the SLN file or open the solution from Recent Projects in Visual Studio, and the bindings will work properly (even using the correct source control plug-in if you use multiple plug-ins).

The following are the steps for the one-time initialization process – or re-initialization if your bindings have somehow gone awry. These steps assume that you do not have the source control program (if it has a standalone client) oepn or Visual Studio open when you start the steps.

1. Open your source control client outside of Visual Studio

2. Set the working folder, if it is not already set, at solution level or higher, make sure there are no overrides lower in the folder tree

   1. Especially for Vista or Win7, make sure the working folder doesn't require admin rights – e.g. in C:\Users and not C:\ etc.
3. Get Latest Version on Solution, in Overwrite mode (this might be called “check out” in SVN, but we are just retrieving here, not locking).
4. Open Visual Studio
5. Tools/Options - Choose source control client to be the appropriate source control client, e.g.:
   
6. Open <MySolution>.sln from Source Control using File -> Source Control -> Open from Source Control (note that the exact command name varies by source control plug-in, but you get the idea)
7. Verify that entire solution loaded correctly
8. Close Visual Studio
9. Close your source control client, if you had one open
10. For now on, open solution by opening <MySolution>.sln on your hard drive. (then it won't matter if you set your default source control provider to something else, because the <MySolution>.sln is bound to the one you chose above)