Question

In Visual Studio 2010 I have a large solution that contains number of .cs files that are no longer used (not referenced in .csproj), but still present in code repository (ClearCase). Do you know of any tool / extension / script that would find all such files?

One could write a script that goes through all projects’ directories, takes all files that are checked in and than compares against content of a project file. In it is not there, than we have a candidate for deletion. It is not too exotic, so I wonder whether such a script already exist. Otherwise it will be a good occasion to get dust off my Python book.

Answer 1

The only script already discussed on SO was “Visual Studio macro: Find files that aren’t included in the project?“.

It could be completed with a cleartool command in order to :

• checkout the parent directory
• cleartool rmname -force the_file (which allows to force the delete)
• checkin the parent directory.

Since it is a bit cumbersome, another approach would be to:

• run the script and delete the unused files (simple OS delete, nothing to do with ClearCase)
• import the result back into ClearCase (with clearfsimport), using a -rmname option: that will automatically delete the target files which are no longer present in the imported source (ie the one where you executed your cleaning script).