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Contributing.md

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Contributing code

Project structure

The VS.DiffAllFiles solution is organized into a number of different projects.

  • VS.DiffAllFiles - This project doesn't actually produce any used binaries, but contains all of the code that is shared with the version-specific VS20** projects. This is a shared project (project type was added in VS2015), and this shared project is added to the main version specific projects. This allows us to only have to make code changes in a single place and have it apply to all of the other projects. See the Guidance for Updating an Extension for Visual Studio 2022.
  • VS.DiffAllFiles.VS20** - These projects are used to build the VSIX installer for the various versions of Visual Studio. Notable caveats for each version are listed below.
  • VS.DiffAllFiles.VS2012 - Git was not supported in the TeamExplorer window for this version, so there are less references and some preprocessor exclusions for files related to Git.
  • VS.DiffAllFiles.VS2019 - Throughout the point releases of VS2019, Git functionality was slowly moved from the TeamExplorer window to a new window. As of now, no extensibility points have been documented for this new window, so recent versions of VS2019 will not benefit from this extension for Git.
  • VS.DiffAllFiles.VS2022 - Git was completely removed from the TeamExplorer window for this version, so some preprocessor exclusions exist for files related to Git. As of now, no extensibility points have been documented for this new window, so VS2022 will not benefit from this extension for Git.

Why is there a project for each version of Visual Studio

Because the extension references the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.* assemblies, we cannot have a single project that targets all versions of Visual Studio; when we try it results in runtime errors saying that the extension is not able to load the required version of the assemblies.

To work around this issue, we have to include the Visual Studio version-specific assemblies in each project. These assemblies get installed with the extension to ensure that the version the extension expects to find exists at runtime.

Building the code

The individual projects all reference their relative Visual Studio version's references. This means that when building in one version of Visual Studio, you will often receive warnings and errors from the other Visual Studio version projects, as it is unable to find the required version of their references. To avoid this issue, simply unload all of the other projects except for the one that you are attempting to build and run.

Other helpful information

If you are trying to contribute code, you may find these other pages useful: