Preparing .NET Projects for Business Trips

I have the the good fortune to take some interesting business trips occasionally. However, there are few business trip feelings worse than being mid-flight and realizing that you’ve forgotten to pull the latest changes for that project you meant to work on.

Below are some steps I’ve developed – with some convenient Powershell scripts – to prepare my code when I travel.

Defining Some Variables

I begin with two variable definitions:

• $RepoBaseFolder = "C:\Users\SeanK\Repositories"
• $OfflineNugetLocation = "C:\Users\SeanK\OneDrive\Nuget_Offline"

Update all the Repositories

I store all of my repositories in C:\users\SeanK\Repositories, and I use git for 99% of my source code management. So first up, I pull all of the folders that are in my Repositories location, and I git pull to get the latest for each of them.

Get-ChildItem C:\Users\SeanK\Repositories\ -Directory | Foreach-Object { cd $_.FullName; git pull }

Pull and Update Nuget Packages

This ensures I don’t run into any restore issues.

I find the location of every .sln file within my repositories folder, and I run nuget install from that directory.

Get-ChildItem -Path $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Include *.sln | Where-Object { $_.Directory.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" } | | Foreach-Object { cd $_.Directory.FullName; nuget install }

Pull and Update npm packages

Similarly, it probably makes sense to have all of my npm packages updated – as much as I hate all of the GBs that’s likely going to consume:

  Get-ChildItem $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Include package.json | Where-Object { $_.Directory.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" } | Foreach-Object { cd $_.Directory.FullName; npm install }

Note the additional call to -NotLike "*node_modules*". If we pulled an npm install for every component within node_modules, things miiiiiiight take a little longer than expected.

Move all Nuget packages to the Offline Nuget folder

OK, so I’ve got the Nuget packages installed for my existing projects, which is great. But what if I want to start a new project? How will I be able to do that without pulling down a ton of things from the internet?

I copy the Nuget packages into my offline packages folder, which happens to be a OneDrive folder as well (so it syncs across my machines).

Get-ChildItem -Path $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Directory | Where-Object { $_.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" -and$_.FullName -like "*packages" } | Foreach-Object { Copy-Item $($_.FullName+"\*.*") $OfflineNugetLocation  -ErrorVariable capturedErrors -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; $capturedErrors | foreach-object { if ($_ -notmatch "already exists") { write-error $_ }}}

A few things to note here:

• The additional call to -NotLike "*node_modules*".
• We also make sure that we’re only looking at paths that end in packages
• We pipe the errors into an ErrorVariable so that we can suppress the “already exists” errors when copying

Enable NPM offline package store

Some people use packages tools such as npm_lazy or local-npm, but according to the docs, npm caches on my local directory of %AppData%/npm-cache which means I should be able to restore easily enough if I need to.

So I don’t need to actually take any action on this as long as I restore everything ahead of time.

Enable Nuget Offline Package Source

If I need to, I add an offline package source (only need to do this once):

nuget source add -Name "Local offline" -Source C:\Users\SeanK\OneDrive\Nuget_Offline

When I’m in Visual Studio, to ensure that the offline source is the only one that’s in use, I do the following:

• Open Visual Studio
• From the menu, select Tools –> Nuget Package Manager –> Package Manager Settings
• Select Package Manager Sources
• Un-select all the available package sources that aren’t your offline source

Putting it all Together: the Script

The full script can be found below – feel free to modify the variables up top and save as your own .ps1 file.

$RepoBaseFolder = "C:\Users\SeanK\Repositories\"
$OfflineNugetLocation = "C:\Users\SeanK\OneDrive\Nuget_Offline"

Get-ChildItem $RepoBaseFolder -Directory | Foreach-Object { cd $_.FullName; git pull }

Get-ChildItem -Path $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Include *.sln | Where-Object { $_.Directory.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" } | Foreach-Object { cd $_.Directory.FullName; nuget install }

Get-ChildItem $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Include package.json | Where-Object { $_.Directory.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" } | Foreach-Object { cd $_.Directory.FullName; npm install }

Get-ChildItem -Path $RepoBaseFolder -Recurse -Directory | Where-Object { $_.FullName -NotLike "*node_modules*" -and$_.FullName -like "*packages" } | Foreach-Object { Copy-Item $($_.FullName+"\*.*") $OfflineNugetLocation  -ErrorVariable capturedErrors -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; $capturedErrors | foreach-object { if ($_ -notmatch "already exists") { write-error $_ }}}

nuget source add -Name "Local offline" -Source $OfflineNugetLocation

What are Your Steps?

Am I missing any steps that you use to prepare? What other steps do you take to prep your code for travel? Sound off in the comments!

I hope you found this tutorial useful. Happy travels!