Changing Visual Studio's default build output path

Question

Are there any good reasons to modify your project's build output path from its default of "bin\debug"? Is there any benefit to pointing all your projects within a solution to a common build output location?

Answer 1

Yes, I typically do this all the time. As Harry said, it reduces disk space usage. That really is not a big deal to me, since disk space is incredibly cheap, but it might be a concern for you. The real reason I do it it to better mirror what the deployment will look like. The best way to do this is to have a property sheet which modifies the output directory to $(SolutionDir)/build/bin. After this, I set the working directory to $(SolutionDir)/build, which is the whole structure which is identical to what would be deployed, rather than having it spread out among the various project directories.

build
|-- bin
|   |-- foo.exe
|   |-- libfoo.dll
|   `-- libbar.dll
|-- plugins
|   |-- extender.py
|   `-- something.lua
`-- skins
    |-- default.skin
    `-- white-and-gold.skin

Overall, having an isolated directory for things that are built (rather than sources) is a good thing. It eases writing custom build steps, since you know where the ultimate output will be and eases integration with your version control system, since you can just set it to ignore that whole directory, rather than going around setting ignore for all .exe, .lib, .so, .dll and whatever for every little directory.