In Visual Studio, what's the quick way to remove all exclusion files from a project?

Question

I have a LARGE project in visual studio 2008. It has accumulated several years trying to figure out and often excluding (without deleting) files from the project. I need a way to permanently delete any excluded file. There are thousands of files and hundreds of folders. Doing this manually in the solution explorer will take too much time.

I could create a project parser and compare with the file system, but I hope for a shortcut.

thanks

Answer 1

Are excluded files under source control along with the rest? If not, just make sure everything is checked, go to the new temporary location, move the old directory aside as a backup, and move the temporary folder to where the old one was.

If the experiments are checked for source control, this is a little more complicated - you probably have to go with the project file parser. It may not be very difficult.

EDIT: Well, if all of this is in SVN, I suggest you write a very crude project parser. Give him a list of XPath expressions (or something similar) to select "likely paths." Select everything in the project file and copy each selected file to a new location (including subdirectories, etc.). Also copy project files and solution files. Then try to build - if this fails, you missed something: repeat.

Continue until it builds, and then check it out. As long as everything is in order, you can drive everything else out :)

EDIT: here is the beginning of what I mean:

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Xml.Linq; public class ProjectParser { static void Main(string[] args) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(args[0]); XNamespace ns = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"; DumpMatches(doc.Descendants(ns + "Compile") .Select(x => x.Attribute("Include").Value)); DumpMatches(doc.Descendants(ns + "AssemblyOriginatorKeyFile") .Select(x => x.Value)); } static void DumpMatches(IEnumerable<string> values) { foreach (string x in values) { Console.WriteLine(x); } } } 

(I originally tried to use XPath, but the namespace stuff made it a pain.)

Answer 2

Run the command line and try DEL/S *.exclude . I don't think you'd better write an add-in for Visual Studio.