What are all these Visual Studio 2005 files for?

Question

I just (re-)joined a company to work on some C++ projects. I'm looking at the files and I'm trying to figure out what all the Visual Studio related files are. Many I suspect are orphans from previous versions of the IDE.

I've listed all the file extensions below and annotated the ones I think I understand. If can provide more information about the individual files or how they different files are related, I would be very appreciative. I'd also like to hear advice on dealing with these files under some version control system (we use Visual SourceSafe for now).

.dsp - Developer Studio project (obsolete?)
.dsw - Developer Studio workspace (obsolete?)
.ncb - No compile browser file (for intellisense?)
.sln - Solution
.suo - Solution user options
.vcproj - VC++ project file
.vcproj.$DOMAIN.$USER.user - huh?
.vcproj.vspscc - ?
.vsscc - ?
.vssscc - ?
.vc08 - ?
What drives me really crazy are the files that are binary rather than simple text files. Why does MS hate text files so much? Sigh...

-cr

Answer 1

.dsp - Obsolete
.dsw - Obsolete
.ncb - for intellisense (should not be in source control)
.sln - Solution
.suo - Solution user options (should not be in source control)
.vcproj - VC++ project file
.vcproj.$DOMAIN.$USER.user - Project user options (should not be in source control)
.vcproj.vspscc - source control file
.vsscc - source control file
.vssscc - source control file

VSS = Visual Source Safe
SCC = Source Code Control (The TLA for the source control plugin architecture in VS)

Answer 2

As you correctly state, the .dsp & .dsw files are the old VC6 project file format and are obsolete in the context of VS2005 - well, once they've been converted.

.ncb is the intellisense database and the .vcproj.$DOMAIN.$USER.user files contain user-specific project settings. No idea what they are, though - I just noticed that both VS2005 and VS2008 tend to create these files.

Answer 3

The vsscc and vssscc have to do with Visual Source Safe.