VS Project Assistant

After I was fed up with editing my project files in notepad all the time to synchronize changes between different projects and inserting the <DedendentUpon /> element in all my unit tests, I decided to write a small utility that aids me in these menial project maintenance tasks.

The result of this work is pass – short for “project assistant”. Maybe other developers can benefit from this tool as well, so here goes:

Collating Project Nodes

A nice feature of the Visual Studio IDE is that it can display files as if they were sub-nodes of another file. You can see this feature in action when you create a Form or a Control:

Image showing how a designer file appears as a sub-element of its related form file

This feature is a generic one. You can make any file become a subnode of another file. This is a trick many people are already using to better organize their unit tests and partial classes. Normally, it would involve adding a <DedendentUpon /> element under the <File /> node in your .csproj file with notepad.

Using the ‘collate’ command, pass will turn any files beginning with the same name as another file into subnodes of that file.

Image showing custom files appearing as a sub-elements of their related parents

Simply invoke pass like this:

pass collate MyProject.csproj

…and your unit tests and other nested files will be arranged automatically. You can even integrate this as an “External Tool” in Visual Studio.

Copying Project Filelists

XNA provides a built-in feature that keeps .csproj files in sync with each other. However, if one of the projects is not an XNA project (for example, when you’re using a plain class library in your XNA game), this mechanism can’t be used. Pass has also proven useful at work, where I can easily update the file list of special .NET Compact Framework .csproj files.

If you had a MyProject (x86).csproj and wanted to take over the files added to that project file into another project file called MyProject (XBox 360).csproj, just invoke pass like this:

pass copy "MyProject (x86).csproj" "MyProject (XBox 360).csproj"

Pass will do its best to keep the layout of the .csproj file intact. It first scans the source project for <ItemGroup /> nodes containing <Compile /> nodes and then does the same for the target project, only that this time, it will replace the contents of those <ItemGroup /> nodes with the ones from the source project. If the target project has more <ItemGroup /> nodes, the additional nodes will be removed. If it has less, additional <ItemGroup /> nodes will be created.

Sorry about the file size! The actual executable is only 14 KiB, but I have included NUnit 2.5 binaries for .NET 2.0 and Mono 2.0 so you can compile it out-of-the-box even when you don’t have NUnit installed ;-)

Download

Download

Nuclex.ProjectAssistant.7z (1.00 MiB)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please copy the string 4WVCAb to the field below:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.