Why does C# designer-generated code (like Form1.designer.cs) play havoc with Subversion?

Question

My workshop has recently switched to Subversion from SourceSafe, freeing us from automatic locks. This led to concurrent editing of the Forms, which is wonderful. But when multiple developers commit their changes, the code files created by the designer (all the files named TheFormName.designer.cs) cause conflicts which are very difficult to resolve.

As far as I can tell, this is because the code generated by the designer is heavily re-arranged whenever the user modifies it, no matter how little the actual change really did.

• How do I make these conflicts easier to resolve?
• Is there some way to tell the designer to modify the code less?
• How do you, the experienced C# teams, deal with concurrent modification of a Form?

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with C# or the Windows Form Designer, but looking at some designer.cs files I could find online they don't have a particularly complicated structure.

What parts of it are being re-arranged? I guess it's mostly the order of the properties in the InitializeComponent() method that's jumbled up?

If that's the case, you might be able to write a simple script that re-orders those lines alphabetically, say (especially if you never edit these files manually anyway), and use that as a pre-commit hook script in Subversion.

Um, right... scratch that. The big red box at the bottom of that section says you're not supposed to modify transactions in hook scripts. But you might be able to find another way to run that script somewhere between the designer.cs file being changed and it being committed.

Edit:

Actually, given scraimer's comment on this:

Total hack, but in the worst case, just before a merge, I could sort BOTH files, and make the merge simply a line-by-line affair...

Can't you let Subversion set an external merge program? I've been using KDiff3, which can run a preprocessor command before doing diffs or merges, so you could automate that process.