Resources for setting up a Visual Studio/C++ development environment

Question

I haven't done much "front-end" development in about 15 years since moving to database development. I'm planning to start work on a personal project using C++ and since I already have MSDN I'll probably end up doing it in Visual Studio 2010. I'm thinking about using Subversion as a version control system eventually. Of course, I'd like to get up and running as quickly as I can, but I'd also like to avoid any pitfalls from a poorly organized project environment.

So, my question is, are there any good resources with common best practices for setting up a development environment? I'm thinking along the lines of where to break down a solution into multiple projects if necessary, how to set up a unit testing process, organizing resources, directories, etc.

Are there any great add-ons that I should make sure I have set up from the start?

Most tutorials just have one simple project, type in your code and click on build to see that your new application says, "Hello World!".

This will be a Windows application with several DLLs as well (no web development), so there doesn't need to be a deploy to a web server kind of process.

Mostly I just want to make sure that I don't miss anything big and then have to extensively refactor because of it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would also like a good answer to this question. What I've done is set it up so that each solution makes reference to a $(SolutionDir)\build directory for includes and libraries. That way each project that has dependencies on other projects can access them and versions won't compete. Then there are post-build commands to package up headers and .lib files into a "distribution" folder. I use CC.net to build each package on checkin. When we decide to update a dependency project we "release" it to ourselves, which requires manual tagging, manual copying current.zip into a releases area and giving it a version number, and copying that into the /build of the projects that depend on the upgrade.

Everything works pretty great except this manual process at the end. I'd really love to get rid of it but can't seem to. Read an article from ACM about "Continuous Release" that would be really nice to have an implementation of but there isn't any. I keep telling myself I'll make one.

If I use "junctions" in the windows filesystem I can link "distribute" to "build" and then build a secondary solution that includes all the projects that are dependent on each other to build a product. When I did that though it encouraged developers to use it for active development, which discouraged TDD and proper releasing.