Suppress warning on solution level. Treat warning as error on solution level

Question

I am trying to set global rules for my team. We are using VS2012 with TFS for our C# projects. I'd like to suppress some of the warnings and also treat some of the warnings as errors. I found the way to do it on the project level - project properties -> build tab.

But we have solution with more than hundred projects and I am looking for some easier way to set those rules globally.

Answer 1

A solution is just a (pretty dumb) container for projects. If you open it in a text editor you'll quickly see you can't extend it, only add projects/items.

What you want is one or more common msbuild files specifying all needed options for compiler/linker/whatever tools you use, and Import it in every single project. We've been using this for years and it's very convenient (though part of the convenience is probably we also wrote a small tool to generate project files to automatically import the global properties so we don't have to mess with them manually)

Alternatively you could add a machine wide file, look in $(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets to see where to place those files. I'm not going to copy/paste the content here, but the very first lines basically check if there are user definded files in eg $(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\$(MSBuildThisFile)\ImportBefore and if so they're all imported before all common msbuild stuff. Likewise the end of the Microsoft.CSharp.targets contains similar logic to import files after all common msbuild stuff.