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Our development team is currently working on a project in Visual Studio Professional 2015 that involves forms, etc. As it stands, the master code is stored on an individuals desktop but a copy can be found on a shared drive as well as my personal hard drive.

We just encountered a very serious issue. I made changes to my copy on my personal hard drive and when I arrived at work, was made aware that my change had in fact changed the master code. This will prevent anyone from being able to experiment with the code at all, anywhere.

Has anyone ever experienced this and if so, do you know of any way to make it stop??

Janus Orr
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    Do you have a version control system in place? You should definitely have one which would obviate these issues. – rory.ap May 11 '16 at 15:07
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    Also, how could we possibly know how to make it stop without any other details from you on how your copying mechanism works? – rory.ap May 11 '16 at 15:08
  • Visual Studio itself isn't doing this. You presumably have some mechanism to do this, which we don't know what it is, but in any case, +1 for the mechanism *should* be a proper version control system (subversion and git are popular, depending how centralized you want.) – neminem May 11 '16 at 15:12
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    Visual Studio only changes the files you ask it to change, if you have multiple copies of the projects and only open one of them, the other will not be touched. Beyond this, a serious question is this: **Are you using a version control system?** If the answer is no, then the next question is **why the hell not?** – Lasse V. Karlsen May 11 '16 at 15:21

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From the responses, no one else has heard of this happening or even knew it to be a thing, so creating backups of the code should have been sufficient. Using a VCS is not the only way. Without the VCS, we are and have been creating backup copies of all coding. The problem becomes if I'm attempting to make an update to test in my copy of the code, it's updating all copies - never in the history of any coding/application have I ever seen this.

The copies I am referring to, is literally a copy. I copy the project, then put it in another folder on my hard drive. It makes no logical sense to me or the team how or why a copy is updating the master and vice versa.

I guess the only solution as this point is to use a VCS. I would like to know why and how this is happening regardless because we were only lucky that this was a simple line of code that was changed and not a massive overhaul!

Janus Orr
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