Best Tool/Method to Keep .Resx and Designer.cs Files in a Consistent Order

Question

I work in a development shop with about 20 other developers. It's really a chore to have to merge changes to a Designer.cs file or a .Resx file, when 50% of the changes just involved a change in ordering of the same code in two updates.

What do other development teams do to keep these files in order, such that when two people make changes, the changes can easily merge into the file without having to also reconcile properties that just got moved around in them?

There is CodeProject project out there that does a sort on the data before comparing them... and that would make it easier to merge the changes. But that's an additional step I'd like to automate better.

Has anyone come up with a way to incorporate the sort/diff/merge-into-current-structure process into an automated solution?

I haven't used TFS, so maybe they have figured this out. But I just thought I'd see if anyone has any tricks?

Answer 1

The codeproject app you mention can be executed as a prebuild step so you don't have to do anything manually, just a once-off setup.

If you split resx files up into smaller files (i.e avoid using a massive global string table), then you can minimise contention. As long as programmers try to keep their locks for short periods you can then use exclusive locks to guarantee only one user can make edits to any file at a time, and the whole merge issue can be eliminated - often this can be achieved without too much inconvenience as long as your working practices are efficient. Limiting changes to a file to a limited set of specific users can help (and can also improve the consistency of ui too)

The last option is to invest in a better merge tool, to minimise the difficulty of merging.

Whichever approach you choose, there is always a bit of compromise needed.

Answer 2

My team uses a set of database tables and a couple of web pages to maintain the values, and to allow translations to be done.

We then have an export application, which generates the resx files using the ResXResourceWriter class and also generates the designer.cs files by calling the resgen.exe tool.

We all point our local copies of the export application to a common database, and we have our automated build server run the application in console mode to any builds always have the latest resources.

If you look at some of my recent questions, you'll see I've just recently resolved a few issues with that process.

• Do I need the resx Designer.cs file?
• “Run Custom Tool” for resx files in MVC2 project (from an external application/script)
• Why am I getting App_GlobalResources assembly generated? (Error = CS0433)

Hopefully, that'll give you a few ideas. It's definitely worth spending the time to get this right. Especially from the sounds of your situation, a few days writing some support tools would be time well spent.