Question

I’d like to write a macro to crawl through the files in my project directory and find files that aren’t included in the project.

In playing around with the DTE object, I see that the Project object has ProjectItems; if a ProjectItem represents a directory, then it has its own ProjectItems collection. This gives me all files that are included in the project.

So I could crawl recursively through each ProjectItems collection, and for each ProjectItem that’s a directory, check to see if there are files in the file system that don’t have a corresponding ProjectItem. This seems clumsy, though.

Any ideas of a simpler way to approach this?

Answer 1

Thanks to @JaredPar and @lpthnc for pointing me in the right direction. I ended up using an approach very similar to what @JaredPar outlines above. Here’s my working macro FWIW.

Imports System.IO
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports EnvDTE

Public Module Main

    Sub IncludeNewFiles()
        Dim Count As Integer = 0
        For Each Project As Project In DTE.Solution.Projects
            If Project.UniqueName.EndsWith(".vbproj") Then
                Dim NewFiles As List(Of String) = GetFilesNotInProject(Project)
                For Each File In NewFiles
                    Project.ProjectItems.AddFromFile(File)
                Next
                Count += NewFiles.Count
            End If
        Next
        DTE.StatusBar.Text = String.Format("{0} new file{1} included in the project.", Count, If(Count = 1, "", "s"))
    End Sub

    Private Function GetAllProjectFiles(ByVal ProjectItems As ProjectItems, ByVal Extension As String) As List(Of String)
        GetAllProjectFiles = New List(Of String)
        For Each ProjectItem As ProjectItem In ProjectItems
            For i As Integer = 1 To ProjectItem.FileCount
                Dim FileName As String = ProjectItem.FileNames(i)
                If Path.GetExtension(fileName).ToLower = Extension Then
                    GetAllProjectFiles.Add(fileName)
                End If
            Next
            GetAllProjectFiles.AddRange(GetAllProjectFiles(ProjectItem.ProjectItems, Extension))
        Next
    End Function

    Private Function GetFilesNotInProject(ByVal Project As Project) As List(Of String)
        Dim StartPath As String = Path.GetDirectoryName(Project.FullName)
        Dim ProjectFiles As List(Of String) = GetAllProjectFiles(Project.ProjectItems, ".vb")
        GetFilesNotInProject = New List(Of String)
        For Each file In Directory.GetFiles(StartPath, "*.vb", SearchOption.AllDirectories)
            If Not ProjectFiles.Contains(file) Then GetFilesNotInProject.Add(file)
        Next
    End Function

End Module