In our current app I have added the LLBLGen-generated project to our solution, all of which is stored in source control with VSS. The primary purpose for this is to support team development and to track changes to the custom entity code between builds of our app.

When LLBLGen generates the files, it seems to add some odd characters to the beginning of each file. In certain text editors they appear as:  The intersting thing is that these characters are not displayed within the Visual Studio IDE but are retained in the file.

The presence of these odd characters forces VSS to consider these files as "binary". It therefore will not perform a diff using its internal tool. Although it is possible to use some other diff tools we lose the nice integration inside of VS.NET.

Any ideas on what caused these characters to appear in the files?

Which llblgen pro version are you using? Do you use the very latest templates? Did you alter/edit the existing templates?

they appear as: 

Aren't those unicode indicators?

Not much help I know, but the best thing I ever did was move to Perforce for source-control.

Otis wrote:

Which llblgen pro version are you using? Do you use the very latest templates? Did you alter/edit the existing templates?

The project was originally started with 1.0.2004.2 about a year ago, although now I am using version 1.0.2005.1 with templates dated Mar 2, 2006. I have not made any modifications to the templates.

I decided to open the latest .template files into the same text editor that shows me those characters and I only found a handful of the files that did not contain the characters.

Fortunately, I just realized that I could go into VSS, view the properties of the file, and force VSS to treat it as text instead of binary. It is a bit unfortunate that I have to go in and modify each file one by one but at least I have a way to work around it.

Which template for example did have the characters? (so I could examine the template files and see if there's garbage in the file, so I could remove the garbage). I've to say that I haven't seen the characters in any editor I use (both vs.net and templatestudio)

The entity.template files (for both C# and VB) have the strange characters.

Here is one text editor that will show the characters: http://www.boxersoftware.com/pgbwin.htm

In Homesite I can see them too. I'll chop them off. I've no idea how they could have been included in the text.

(edit) hmm, it appears that ALL templates have this. A quick test shows that TemplateStudio creates unicode files and therefore these characters appear in front of the text.

Hmm... If you change the encoding in the project properties in the llblgen pro designer to ASCII, you should get plain ascii output, instead of UTF-8 which you get by default.

OK, I will try ASCII format the next time I refresh my project.