First Collaboration Project - Update Issues

22-degrees

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 11, 2012
Messages
156
Location
South East Ireland
Programming Experience
1-3
Hi all,

While I have been coding with .net for 7 years now, I am probably still classed as beginner to intermediate because I never learned more than what my needs at the time of my projects required. I can still do anything I want with the knowledge I have which is the only thing that matters to me as my projects will always remain personal, never public.

I had created a program to help a friend out with a personal project of ours.. As time has progressed, so too has the expansion of the program and such was the positive outcome of the program that my friend, an old coder from his college days, decided to familiarize himself with visual studio 2010 and vb.net to help with the workload which was building rapidly..

As the weeks have passed, we have achieved a lot, but there is one thing that is holding us back now.. Personal needs from this program have seen us create our own user-profiles to handle our preferences for the many settings and options involved but.. There are some sections that are coded differently on my version and his to suit our individual needs.. And whenever one of us completes a major upgrade that benefits the both of us, it can get a bit tedious trying to copy and paste sections of code to each other while updating declarations etc

Is there an easier way to manage our code during collaboration projects like this? I have never worked with modules.. or any classes outside of the main form Class, and from light research, it seems that the class and module are handled very differently to the style I have grown accustomed to using when dealing with just forms and subs..

Hoping someone can point me in the right direction/s


Thank you
 
Do your projects contain multiple forms, each with a specific purpose? Congratulations, you have learned how to use classes. Each form is a class. Just as you use each form to encapsulate functionality related to a specific task, so all classes are used. People seem to be able to handle the concept of forms easily enough because they can see them but as soon as things get a little bit abstract it seems to become black magic. Think of all the different classes you use from the .NET Framework all the time. The Form class, the TextBox class, the String class, the DataTable class, etc, etc. Each of those is just an encapsulation of functionality relating to a particular type of object. That's how you should design your own classes, e.g. if you have a need to process files of a particular format all the time then you could create a FileProcessor class and create an instance each time you need to process a file.

If you will use the same functionality in multiple projects then you can create your classes in a class library instead of in an application. The library project compiles to a DLL and you can then reference that in multiple other projects. That's exactly how you make use of the .NET Framework class library.
 
Thanks for the information.. As you can probably tell, I was self-taught, the "on the fly" way.. Outside of multiple forms, I have never needed to know anything else to do what I needed to do.. I just copy-pasted sections of code from one project to another according as I needed it.. I will spend some time studying classes as it seems like my coding is shifting in a new direction..

Once again, thanks for putting things into perspective. :)
 
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