Home/ Questions/Q 616837
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T18:22:10+00:00

I’m currently in the process of stripping down, refactoring and cleaning up a medium

  • 0

I’m currently in the process of stripping down, refactoring and cleaning up a medium sized (15 ish projects) Visual Studio solution. The solution contains projects in both C++ and C#.

I’m keen to keep things as neat as possible in terms of output – seperating anything compiler created from source code, as it helps subversion (okay, I can tell it to ignore files, but I still feel it’s messy) from freaking out.

The output I would like to achieve is as follows:

SolutionDir/
SolutionDir/src/project1/{ Code here }
SolutionDir/int/project1/configuration/{.obj files and other misc compiler junk here}
SolutionDir/bin/project1/configuration/{The fun stuff goes here}

This seems trivial with C++ projects as you can specify both the output and the intermediates directory. However with C#, at least through the Visual Studio 2008 User Interface it seems impossible to move the obj directory?

After doing some digging, I added

<IntermediateOutputPath>..\..\int\ProjectName\Debug\</IntermediateOutputPath>

to the C# .csproj

This appears to work, sort of. It’s true the intermediates appear to end up there, but a directory ‘obj’ and under it a configuration directory (e.g. ‘debug’) and then a ‘TempPE’ directory are created in the old location – all of which are empty.

This isn’t really a big deal, but it would be nice to know the cause of this behavior and if possible a way to fix it.

Thanks in advance!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve been searching for a solution for this problem myself, and came up with something less intrusive.

    Create a bat file named “CleanSrcDir.bat” somewhere (i placed mine in my project path) with the following contents:

    rmdir /S /Q %1obj
SET %ERRORLEVEL%=0

    After this, add something similar to the C# project’s post-build events:

    $(ProjectDir)CleanSrcDir.bat $(ProjectDir)

    (This assumes you placed your bat file in the project directory, of course.)
    Then change the post-build settings to “Always”, and you’re done.

    It’s a little hackish, but sure makes the version control problem go away.

    • 0