Visual Studio and Perforce: Suppress the Open Connection dialog

Dave Chestnutt — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:14:00 GMT

We've used Perforce source control for a number of years. It's a great tool and it integrates with Visual Studio pretty well. But its Visual Studio integration has one really annoying feature, that fortunately, you can work around.

The feature is this: If your solution has 10 projects in it, you can put each of those 10 projects in a separate Perforce Depot. Is that useful? I'll leave that to you. Suffice it to say that we put all our source in one Depot.

The problem comes when you reload a solution. Perforce, by default, wants to prompt you for login information - for each project in the solution. We have some solutions with 20-30 projects, so this gets pretty annoying.

This is the Perforce "Open Connection" screen that pops up over and over again:

Fortunately, you can suppress this dialog (assuming that you only use one Depot!) The option is pretty well hidden, but here's how you get to it. Open Visual Studio, and before you open your solution file, go to Tools - Options. Select SCC provider on the left, and click the Advanced button:

This brings up the well-hidden Perforce dialog. Switch to the Connection tab and click the option called: "Bind to the workspace that matches your Perforce environment settings"

Presto! Press Ok to save your settings, and the Perforce "Open Connection" screen is banished, never to annoy you again.

This makes the Perforce integration fairly practical in Visual Studio. It's not perfect, but it automatically checks out files for you (as you try to change them). And that's extremely useful.

It just makes my day...

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Visual Studio and Perforce: Suppress the Open Connection dialog