Visual Studio - Projects from multiple source control providers?

Question

OK, this has got to be a common problem. I hope one of you geniuses knows a solution!

The problem I'm trying to solve is this: We use a lot of code from various public sources, and cannot easily keep them all current within Visual Studio because they use different source control providers.

Ideally, you could just add these projects to your own Visual Studio solutions, reference them in your own projects, and keep them current by right-clicking a project and selecting "get latest..." whenever you want to.

However, since Visual Studio does not support multiple simultaneous source control providers, how do you go about keeping project references current? Right now we import them to a separate location, and then copy/paste the source files into our own solution folder. There has to be a better way. If you know of one, I'd sure appreciate it.

Our internal source control provider is Team Foundation Server.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This may seem simplistic, but just have a common place for the binaries for your project references. Do you really need to debug all of the code from these 3rd parties? I would only think that you would need to do that if there is a problem.

If you really need to do this, I would start using scripts and run each script against the command line utilities of cvs, subversion, git, etc whatever source control repositories. Then once you have those individual scripts up and running you can write a batch file to bring them all together. After you do that you can write a tfs commmand to import that code into your TFS repo.

This is oversimplifying this I know, but your question is large in scope. I advise to start small (individual repo), and grow your scripts and master scripts.