Move intermediates directory on C# projects in Visual Studio

Question

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!

Answer 1

If you add both of the following lines to each build configuration then the "obj" folder is not created by default and there is no need for a post-build action:

<IntermediateOutputPath>Assembly\obj\Debug\</IntermediateOutputPath>
<BaseIntermediateOutputPath>Assembly\obj\Debug\</BaseIntermediateOutputPath>

SVN / SCC ignore properties are also useful if desired