Starting From Scratch - Dev Zero

One of the things I hate the most is project set up.  I've talked about that in the past, but I want to revisit it today.  Essentially, since this is a re-start of a lot of pieces that I've done in the past, I want to clear the slate, as it was, and talk about some of the things I've learned over this long, crazy journey that has been my career.
One thing to be clear on.  I'm not going to be working on the OSX version of this until I have the windows basic framework put to bed.  I just wanted to make that clear from the get-go.
First things first, let's lay out our project directory structure.  To me, that's a significant issue that needs to be resolved at the beginning of any project. I'm going to follow a fairly common project layout, with some small adjustments.
Since this is going to run across multiple platforms, I want to ensure that each platform has it's own 'solution' folder.  On Windows, we'll be using Visual Studio (2012 for now, I'll backfill into 2012 later). I suspect on Mac it'll be Xcode.  Linux will undoubtably be makefiles of some sort. So, for lack of a better term, the project is called 'Wanton'. So my folder layout will look something like this:

I'm a firm believer that one should never check in executables; whatever you submit into you revision control system should be able to rebuild without error.  Continuous Integration servers are great for that. They can submit a numbered build elsewhere that you can grab, if need be.  That and it allows for 'verified builds' to go out to the appropriate groups.
I went ahead and let Dev Studio create the project for me.  It puts it into it's default layout (which isn't optimal for me).  So that requires a little hand editing.  It's fairly trivial to fix up the issues that are created by hand. It does mean, however, that you've got to touch the .sln and .vcxproj files in order to have everything compile correctly.  And it's a huge pain in the ass, the first time you have to do it.  But setting this up right from the start is a huge time saver later. It also makes setting up other build types (Debug/Release) that much easier once you have a baseline to start with.
That's it for now.  I've uploaded the current build to google code.  There's currently nothing in there that's 'interesting' aside from how the project is laid out.  You can access it here: https://code.google.com/p/wanton/.  The code relating to this post has been tagged as R01272013.  Please note that Head may not match the contents of this blog post (ergo the associated tag).  If you don't speak SVN, I recommend you pick up TortoiseSVN and read up here: http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug.html
That's it for today.  I suspect I'll have the next installment ready to go shortly.  Until then, keep it between the lines.

-Ash

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