Hi all,
I just wanted to know what advice do you have for organizing reusable code between MonoGame projects? I mean I guess everybody has his own code base with little helper methods, maybe C# extensions for the MonoGame classes and maybe input controllers and little (or big) frameworks and so forth. How do you manage this code to be able to use it between different MonoGame projects and hopefully future projects while still being able to continue developing this reusable framework code base as needed without breaking older MonoGame projects due to this reusable framwork code changing over time?
In other words: One issue I found is that if you use code between projects and your framework code is evolving with your game code or with one specific MonoGame project your working on then often this breaks another project because it is relying on an older version of this framework code base where things were working differently.
Also what advice do you have on how to setup the overall solutions and projects structure not only for a single MonoGame project / game. At the moment my idea is as follows but not sure this is the right way to approach it:
Have a Visual Studio solution per framework with only a “MonoGame Shared Project” each inside each solution and maybe one or more MonoGame sample projects for some platforms showing how to use the framework code. Each framework residing in one folder.
Then everytime you want to make a new game or create a new multi platform MonoGame project you would create a new folder where you would setup a “MonoGame solution”. With “MonoGame solution” I mean the standard or recommended way to setup a multi platform MonoGame project / game. I think it works this way: The project / game would consist of a “MonoGame Shared Project” and one or more MonoGame projects (one for each platform that you would like to target). To be able to use the code of one of your frameworks in this new game you would then add the framwork code only as a reference by adding the shared project from the framework solution to the game solution. Not totally sure how this works with Shared Projects inside Visual Studio. I think it works with either “add existing item” and “add as link” to add it to the different platform projects in the new game solution from inside Visual Studio. If this is possible this way with “MonoGame Shared Projects”? Do they work that way? I still have to try this out. Or do they work like this, that I have to add the frameworks “MonoGame Shared Project” project to the game solution (so not directly to the adding the framework project to the platform projects!) and only then when the game solution has the framework Shared Project added (as link?) with “add existing project” and “add as link” or so add a reference to the single platform projects to both the framework shared project and the game shared project to be able to work with all the code but keeping things more managable or clean if you will?
Assuming at this point we found the correct way of setting this new game up with Visual Studio we would then have access to the shared game code residing in the game solution and inside the game folder itself as MonoGame Shared Project and also access to the framework code residing outside this folder in another folder.
I guess it is not possible or at least not easy to NOT eventually break exisitng code if the framework is evolving while working on a new game / project. Each older MonoGame project has to adapt to the changes which will happen to the shared framework code. So this would mean alot of work to keep all projects working all the time.
Now starting with version control… If the framework code is under version control with git and of course the game(s) on top of that also… An issue IMHO with this structure would then be that the framwork would be a seperate git project right? Then how to make sure that a commit for a game will work when the code from the framework is under its own version control? Would this then mean that you have to use git submodules for each framework a game uses to make sure a game compiles at some git commit at some point in time although the framework code itself has evolved and changed over time? I mean the MonoGame code itself had this approach with git submodules in the past at least but not sure if it is still the case and if this turned out to be a good solution.
Let me know what works best for you and what you guys and girls think what is the best solution for this all! 
