T414 Sitecore Best Practices Part 1: Introduction to TDS

Posted 2/6/2012 by techphoria414

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Sitecore

Over the next 3 days I'll be posting a series of screencast videos that demonstrate the standards and best practices we've developed for Sitecore projects at Hanson Dodge Creative. The foundational pieces of our standards include Team Development for Sitecore (TDS), the Custom Item Generator shared source module, and scriptlet-based sublayout development. Part 1 of the series is a shorter video providing a high-level introduction to TDS and the separation of development and web roots on your filesystem.

You can also view the Prezi that I created for this screencast.

Part 2: Solution Structure and Working with TDS is available here.

Part 3: Sublayout Development with Custom Items and Scriptlets is available here.

Happy Sitecoring,
Nick Wesselman / techphoria414

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Sean Holmesby said:
2/6/2012 10:15 PM

Hi Nick, Fantastic video. I was wondering how to properly setup out solution using TDS. We started using it on an existing project, which we already had custom MSBuild scripts building the web app to the IIS Webroot folder....so we had to leave the SourceWebProject setting blank to make sure that TDS wouldn't build it over the top again. One thing, with the Config project, you mention File Replacements. Do you store complete files in this project which get copied over the top, or do you transform files using MSBuild xdt:Transform?
Nick Wesselman said:
2/7/2012 12:00 AM

Hi Sean, Be sure to check back on Tuesday, next video will get into more detail on how to setup your solution. Without seeing your solution, I'd probably recommend just using what TDS provides for copying to the webroot. Otherwise I'd guess TDS will have other problems, like installing its connector. We do store complete files in the project. A little redundant, but if you properly break up customizations in App_Config\Include, you can keep the redundancy to a minimum. Nick
Sean Holmesby said:
2/7/2012 1:27 AM

Cool, thanks Nick. Yeah I was hoping to move our project over to the default setup for TDS, but this may take some time, given that we have a lot of custom things occurring in our MSBuild script. Looking forward to your next video, especially the config project. At the moment we have a lot of transformations occurring on config files that may take some time to change over (which also transform the configs in the Include folder - using the Visual Studio extension 'SlowCheetah'). I wrote three blog posts on our experiences with TDS, and was hoping to get some feedback, but am yet to get any. I'd appreciate your feedback if you've got the time to have a read through. Basic Usage - http://blog.igloo.com.au/?p=4487 Advanced Usage - http://blog.igloo.com.au/?p=4489 Settings and Builds - http://blog.igloo.com.au/?p=4504 Cheers, Sean
Nick Wesselman said:
2/8/2012 6:25 PM

Thanks Sean! I updated Part 2 to include a link to your series as well. You cover a lot more of the "gotcha" issues with TDS (e.g. template changes) than I do.