CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netversion-control
jimconstable
jimconstable

Reputation: 2388

What .net files should be excluded from source control?

What file extensions from a .net application should be excluded from source control and why please?

Upvotes: 31

Views: 9330

Answers (3)

The Godfather
The Godfather

Reputation: 929

Here is a list of minimum entries I use in recent .NET projects.

*.vs
*.user
*.cache
bin/
obj/
  • First entry omits the hidden folder .vs and its contents.
  • Last two omits anything under those folders.

Upvotes: 1

Rutger Nijlunsing
Rutger Nijlunsing

Reputation: 5021

Depends on the project, but I've got the following for a Silverlight + WPF project in my .gitignore:

# Visual Studio left-overs
*.suo        # 'user' settings like 'which file is open in Visual Studio'
*.ncb        # Used for debugging
*.user
*.ccscc      # Used for versioning
*.cache

# Editor left-overs
*~           # (x)emacs
*.bak        # Windows related
\#*\#        # (x)emacs
*.orig       # Own usage

# Compiled files
*/bin/
*/obj/
*/Obj/       # git is case sensitive
*/Generated_Code/
PrecompiledWeb
*/ClientBin
# Windows left-overs
Thumbs.db    # Having images in the source tree generates those files in Explorer

However, the '.suo' is somewhat problematic: it also contains 'user' settings which should have been project settings, like the startup page for a Silverlight application.

The best and only way is to iteratively add the files to exclude. If you're using git, using git-gui to quickly and interactively see the list of files which you've forgotten to exclude. Adapt .gitignore and refresh in git-gui. Iterate until the files left over are the ones you typed in.

Some types of files are not quite clear up front. Be sure you understand all the files you check in. For example, for the RIA services in our Silverlight project we had an authentication database generated by Visual Studio which contained 2 accounts and resulted in a hefty 10Mb .MDB database file(!). Once we understood where it came from, changing it to an SQL dump reduced the size to a (still hefty) 500Kb. Constantly (re)checking prior to the checkin itself is always required, so no list is definite.

Upvotes: 30

Jesse Weigert
Jesse Weigert

Reputation: 4854

It really depends on your build system. Check in the minimum files you need to run a full build.

Generally, this means you exclude everything except your csproj, and *.cs files. You can probably check in your .sln file if you want.

Upvotes: 3

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