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What does the previous red minus icon in my Visual Studio Solution Explorer mean?

Recently, the previous small red icon began to appear in front of some of my VS 2015 Solution Explorer. I definitely remember that it wasn’t there a few days before.

I think this has something to do with the git control source that I use (not sure), but I can’t understand what it is.

* edit *

Additional diagnostics added:

  • Files can be opened by double-clicking.
  • Tracking does not work for these files (I mean not activating in the solution browser when switching to the editor tab for this file)
  • Editing and saving don't help
  • Close / Reopen VS does not help
  • Update does not help

* end edit *

enter image description here

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3 answers

According to the version control documentation , it indicates files that have been excluded from version control, for example, in a .gitingore file.

Icon to exclude from version control

However, in my case, with the Community Community Community 2015 Update 2 update, these icons also appear when creating a new project. Even if none of the created files are ignored through .gitignore . Icons disappear after making changes.

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When you create a visual studio project and select the "add to source" option and use Git, Visual studio automatically creates the .gitignore file.

The .gitignore file contains a large number of extensions and directories. For instance:

  • User files such as * .suo, * .user, etc.
  • Build Results, DNS Artifacts
  • Profiler, Resharper, JustCode and TeamCity, and many other add-on artifacts
  • SQL Server * .mdf and * .ldf Files

I think you understand that you can open .gitignore and view it yourself.

You can right-click on a file that is ignored and include it in your source if you want.

This is behavior in Visual Studio 2015. I have not confirmed whether this is behavior in previous versions of Visual Studio.

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I think I managed to figure out what was going on here.

The (-) characters next to each of your files / projects are files that are ignored by .gitignore .

From what I see in your project, this will mean that you ignored the files in the .build and .misc .

As for the (-) symbol next to your solution, I think it means that you also ignored your .sln in your .gitignore file.

Similarly, if you added .csproj files to .gitignore , I would expect a (-) character next to your projects, such as Sliders.Core.Test .

Hope this helps.

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