Hi, we've been discussing the best method for a small development team to share DALs, BLLs, themes, classes and whatnot within our workgroup.  We are 2 full time developers and will have some contractors in and out at certain points.  We're using VS05 Pro and have been developing sites and VB exes and posting to central servers which is fine however we've come to a point where I need access to his stuff and vice versa so we can add existing items to a site from each others' folders but if they change, say a field to a insert query method it, it doesn't reflect to the added item.  It seems that in order to accomplish this w/out going to team editions/servers - kind of extreme $ for a couple of guys - is some kind of monlithic Solution for the whole agency?  I guess I'm asking how do you deal with this in your company.  Thanks and best regards, Alan.

Implement a code versioning system. I use team edition now  but thats a separate issue. CVS is an open source kit and all the big guys use it and will tell you, which items changed and even allows you to go back in time. Microsoft source-safe doesnt have that functionality yet.

Thanks, actually was looking at CVS this morning, I'll have to download and play.  Alan.

I am glad I was able to help, if you need any other assistance related to the issue, please get back in here. If your query is resolved, mark as answer as it helps others. 

There is a free version of Team System Server for 5 users that is available on the MSDN site.  That should work for a small team, if you want to try Team System.

Do you use any kind of version control software? like MS Source Safe?

At this point, no - that's kind of what I was hoping to glean from any responses here, there doesn't seem to be much discussion in any of the books I've purchased or looked at and while plenty of good examples of how to code in various languages and techniques for classes are available on the net, just couldn't find any on how to set up an environment to share effort. I understand source control, that's part of what we need and have built web services as prototypes and that would work but has it's own set of problems.  The real concept I lack I guess is how to share a class in Solution/Site A with Solution/Site B and reflect modifications made to that class within Solution/Site A to Solution/Site B.  Is there a way to register a class, looks like only complied objects can registered?  Or is the architecture such that one would add merely add an existing class from a project somewhere on the disk and treat as your own (e.g. copy books) and I'm merely complicating the whole deal?  Thanks, Alan.  

Hi Alan, as noted earlier a source control will notify if the modifications take place, including time, author etc stamp, however since in your case you want the modifications made for a class in A to be notified to B, you can work it different ways. firstly you can write a custom class that check for the change from the source control based on datatime stamp and sends a notification to a handler in B;

Another approach is that whenever class changes in site A, it creates an entry in a text..log file or a DB--a history table or file and the notifier program reads and compares the last value and notifies ..change.

Another approach is to use WCF or .net 3.0 to use a timer schedule that keeps monitoring a file and notifies each time the file is accessed or changed.

Hope that helps and I have understood your correctly

Thank you all, we'll take a look at the source control packages & try the team eval, if I can find it.  Best regards, Alan.