Project Organization and File Structure

I was just thinking on this and realized that I preach about
this to everyone, all my student, anyone I get into dialog with about
programming development. This is something
I’ve gotten better about over the years and have also seen how big of a problem
it can be not doing so. ORGANIZE YOUR
FILES!!!!! Make a bulletproof file
structure. I can’t stress that any more
than I am right now. If you do not get
your files organized in a way you can find things quickly, you will hurt
yourself later.

Now, I don’t believe I have taken the time to give some big
tips and tricks that have worked before for me on a regular basis, so I’m going
to put them up here now. When I create a
new project I generally spend about 2-3 hours putting it together BEFORE
writing a single line of code. You may
say “WOW that’s a lot of time for preparation,” but I say 2-3 hours on a
project that you’re going to spend more than a week on… that 2-3 hours is
nothing. And if you didn’t do it I
wouldn’t be far from promising it would take 2 weeks instead of 1.

So, what I start a new project what do I do? First of all first and foremost even before
starting VS. I create a master directory
for the project. Typically on the root C
drive of my PC at home, if I had a D partition it would probably be there. For example RuneEngine V2’s master directory
is located at “C:\RUNE2.” Now what goes
in the master directory? The solution
right? NO!!! I stress that the solution
is not created here because with the rest I’m going to cover creating backups
would be nearly impossible or an extremely painful process otherwise.

The next folder I create is a child folder of the Master
directory “Bin”. This is where ALL my
projects output goes. In C:\RUNE2\Bin I have these sub directories:

REACH
HiDef
XBOX360
Mobile
DOCS (Yes I actually build documentation, it would not be
inappropriate for this go to outside of the bin in the master directory if you
prefer)
Editor
EditorAPI

As you may see above, these are all the platform targets,
not debug and release like VS typically creates. This is entirely intentional; my
Debug/Release folders are contained in these.
And this is where my projects target their output. This is why we do NOT put the solution in the
Master directory. When we create the
projects and configure their target paths we do not have to redo this for any
backups we generate. Also, Source
control is easier to… well control this way.

So, where are the projects created? They’re created in Subdirectories of the
Master Directory. The current working
solution is contained in C:\RUNE2\RuneEngine_2D_MAIN, but there are 4 other
backups and iterations of the engine there as well as the initiation of the
Native code etc etc blah blah. The
Master Directory contains anything and everything related to the project in
this setup, and it isn’t burrowed in C:\Users\Me\Documents\Visual Studio
2010\Projects….. Yep, not my favorite place to put things.

A note on source control, IF YOU ARE NOT CAREFUL YOUR
PROJECT CAN BE CORRUPTED, hence why I have multiple backups at all times. Usually it only gets corrupted if you’re using
it incorrectly, but better safe than sorry with large projects.

A note about creation of code files in the solution explorer
and handling folders. In C# you’ve
probably noticed that it adds namespace when you add to the folder. And sometimes you don’t want that. Of course you can just delete it and fix it
that way, but my tip is to just always add files in the namespace you desire
and if you want to move the file somewhere else to be more organized, it’s a
simple drag operation.

I hope this is a good read for other developers out there,
everyone has their own styles of handling files and I’ve tried quite a few
variations and this is the way I plan to stick to for a while. Below is a pseudo copy of my file structure
in RuneEngine v2’s project directories:

C:\
  RUNE2 – Master
    Bin
      REACH (Debug/Release)
      HiDef (Debug/Release)
      XBOX360 (Debug/Release)
      Mobile (Debug/Release)
      DOCS
      Editor (Debug/Release)
      EditorAPI (Debug/Release) – FYI I’m going to be
talking A LOT about this soon.
    Lib
    Includes (Lib and
includes are for the native build ignore them if you’re developing fully
managed)
    RuneEngine_2D_MAIN
(There are
actually multiple solutions here which load different combinations of the
projects)
      RuneEngine
      RuneEngine.Graphics
      RuneEngine.Content
      RuneEngine.Physics
      RuneEngine.ContentExtensions
      RuneEngine.Math
      RuneEngine.Scene
      RuneEngine.Threading
      RuneEngine.Components
    RuneEngineOLD2
    RuneEngineOLD1
    RuneEngineBACKUP
    RENativeDX

I wanted to make one last modification to this, though I suggest this methodology highly if it doesn't work for you don't do it. This ulimatley is a reminder of how important this is and a suggestion in what works for me. It's mostly about what you benefit from most. -Happy coding