How does Visual Studio's source control integration work with Perforce?

Question

We\'re using Perforce and Visual Studio. Whenever we create a branch, some projects will not be bound to source control unless we use \"Open from Source Control\", but other

Answer 1

Using Perforce with Visual Studio can be simplified by using the P4CONFIG environment variable.

Basically you go into Visual Studio, Tools -> Options -> Source Control -> Plug-in Settings, Advanced button. This will bring up a Perforce configuration dialog specific to the SCC integration. Switch to the Connection tab, and check the radio button titled 'Bind the workspace that matches your Perforce environment settings'. This will tell perforce to prefer using P4CONFIG environment variable for determining the environment you are under. This same dialog exists in P4V under Edit -> Preferences, but only affects p4v's behavior.

How you setup the P4CONFIG environment variable is up to you to some degree. I like having them be named the same everywhere so I set a system-wide environment variable P4CONFIG to look for a file named p4config.cfg. This file is just an ini style file, where you can assign other variables such as P4USER, P4CLIENT, P4HOST etc. Perforce will search for this file in the current directory and all parent directories until it encounters one. Basically you put this file in the root most directory of your where your clientspec is mapped to on your hard drive, and leave it alone.

This approach greatly reduces the amount of 'correctness' that the SCC configuration needs in visual studio in order to function. (SAK bindings work fine etc.)

If after syncing your code from perforce for the first time or to a totaly clean directory structure, and getting a dialog complaining about perforce wanting to either temporarily work offline or remove bindings, there is still some editing you need to do. Primarily the .sln file itself needs to be modified so it knows the sln has SCC bindings for itself . This is done by making sure the following fields are placed right after SccNumberOfProjects in the .sln file.

SccProjectName0 = Perforce\u0020Project
SccProvider0 = MSSCCI:Perforce\u0020SCM

All of the individual projects should work fine with default 'SAK bindings' provided you are using the P4CONFIG approach. Fixing this should allow Perforce to work from a clean sync perfectly, and also eliminate the generation of MSSCCPRJ.SCC cruft in each of the project directories.