What is the best way to set up your development environment for Sitecore

Question

The general guidance appears to be to install Sitecore into one folder, e.g. D:\Websites\MyWebSite and then create your Visual Studio project in a separate folder, e.g. C:\Projects\MyWebProject. You would then publish your custom code into the Sitecore folder from Visual Studio (This video explains what I’m describing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Mwcphtz4w around 13 mins in).

I have the following questions:-

1. Do people only store their Visual Studio project in source countrol and not the Sitecore code?
2. The publish option from VS into the Sitecore folder only has options for adding files or deleting anything not in the VS project. How would files removed from the VS project ever get deleted without doing it manually?
3. We use web-deploy to publish sites to staging and live environments. In this scenario would you publish from your VS project or would you set up a way to publish the Sitecore folder (if so how)?
4. Is this actually a good set up to have or do you do something different?

Answer 1

I did a lot of research on this when we started Sitecore development a couple of years ago. I remember reading a post from Sean Kearney that made a lot of sense to me: http://seankearney.com/post/Visual-Studio-Projects-and-Sitecore

We ended up using this approach for both large and small scale projects and it has been great. You will also want to look at a couple of other tools:

• Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) from Hedgehog Development (http://www.hhogdev.com/products/team-development-for-sitecore/overview.aspx)
• CopySauce from Igloo (http://www.igloo.com.au/blog/copysauce-igloos-sitecore-development-utility/)
• SitecoreRocks for Visual Studio

So to answer your questions:

1. All of your code and some of the Sitecore items are stored in source control. The approach you want to take is to only store new Sitecore items (layouts, sublayouts, templates, etc) that you create along with any items you may need to customize. You do not need to store all of the sitecore source, content or modules...just what you would need to reapply to get a fresh environment up-to-date. You can manage this manually but a tool like TDS makes this MUCH easier.
2. We use TDS to manage the publish/deploy to each of our environments. TDS has configurable settings for handling items that have been deleted, including the ability to move it to the Sitecore recycle bin or simply remove it. You have to be careful with this but it does work.
3. We use a separate build environment to assemble and run deployments using TDS and Jenkins. Basically, all of the code is retrieved from the source control system to the Sitecore server and built using MSBuild and TDS. In most cases we use a webdeploy directly to the Sitecore webroot, but for production we build TDS packages and then run them on each Content Delivery Server
4. We have used this setup for 7 sitecore projects so far and I am very happy with how it has worked out. We have questioned whether TDS is worth the license fee but the answer always comes back as a yes. The alternative is not very appealing for our development staff and time savings far out-weigh the costs.