Question

I have two versions of a project. One for Silverlight and one for .NET. The SL project has the vast majority of the code base in it. I want to globally add all files from the SL project into the .NET version as linked files. I’ve managed to do so successfully like this in the csproj file for the .NET version:

<Compile Include="..\MyProj.Common.SL\**\*.cs" Exclude="..\MyProj.Common.SL\Properties\**">

Unfortunately, this adds all the files right to the root of my project… so I end up with a long unreadable list of linked files in the .NET project. I really really really don’t want to have to maintain an entire duplicate directory structure by hand and deal with directory name changes and file name changes and whatnot.

So, is there any way to have Visual Studio preserve the directory structure when adding linked files in the wildcard manner above? Or is there at least a way of making it group all the linked files together under a directory in the .NET project like MyProj.Common.SL.Links?

The very closest I’ve come is to set the <Visible>false</Visible> under the <Compile> tag, which effectively removes the long unreadable list of 300+ files….but unfortunately this screws up Resharper, which no longer sees those files as valid and it goes crazy on all the projects that reference the .NET project. If I could figure out a way of making Resharper not get all messed up, that would be an acceptable solution too…

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think I found a way of getting this to work:

<Compile Include="..\MyProj.Common.SL\**\*.cs" Exclude="..\MyProj.Common.SL\Properties\**">
  <Link>MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles\MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles</Link>
</Compile>

It will create a MyProj.Common.SL.LinkedFiles folder and group all the linked files under that folder.