Solution compatibility between VS and Water

I noticed the following text when reading about the release of Water

Does that mean that, for example, any regular C# solution that was created in Visual Studio should also (unchanged) be able to be opened in Water. and vice versa?

The reason I ask is because it seems that any solution I create in Water works fine in VS, but I have run across more than one VS solution that I can’t open in water. When I try it opens, and shows the .csproj files but they are all empty.

Thanks

Chris,

it means that Elements projects (and their solutions) can be opened and shared between all three IDEs. That of course includes RemObjects C#.

Solutions containing non-Elements projects (Visual C#, Visual Basic, F#, or any other third party languages), will not work in Fire or Water (they can be opened, but any non-Elements projects will be ignored, show as “unsupported project type”, and will not be built.

Yes, .csproj projects are Visual C#, using Mircosoft’s compiler and project system. If you create RemObjects C# projects in VS instead, those will open in Fire/Water, fine.

Well, I guess that makes perfect sense now that you have explained it.

Is there an easy(ish) way to convert a VS C# project to an Elements one?

I’d like to try to do as much in Water as possible, and avoid VS if I can.

Not an automatic one, but the project files are very similar. The best option is to just create a new RemObjects C# project in the same folder as the .csproj and either just add all the same files to it (just drag em in from Explorer into Water), or to then compare the .csproj and .elements project files in a diff viewer and copy the file entries (mostly <Compile ...> tags) over so that those portions of the files look the same.

You can also try just changing the of your (renamed/duplicated .csproj) to use RemObjects.Elements.Echoes.targets instead of the one used by VC# — but that will leave a lot of unused cruft in the project file, as VC# really dirties those up with a lot of unnecessary stuff…

Thanks, logged as bugs://81223 — to look at doing a (semi-)automatic conversion, sometime in the future.

bugs://81223 got closed with status fixed.