Excluding Website Bin directory from TFS2008

Question

I am currently developing a Web Site (not a Web Application) in VS2008. I have a problem however with the way that TFS2008 handles the DLLs in the BIN directory. I do not want them being checked into TFS - this prevents other developers on the team from building the website as TFS will only allow checking them out exclusively. I have tried cloaking the directory in TFS (it still tries to check them out - adding them). You can not exclude the BIN directory via the Solution Explorer as it is a required directory for a web site.

So how should I go about setting the configuration to handle this?

Answer 1

Put all shared assemblies into a "lib" directory under your main "trunk" folder and reference them into your Web Site from "lib". In this case TFS will not check-in the assemblies into the "bin" folder of your web site but it will only add a text file which has the same name as your assembly and with the ".refresh" extension (for example MyAssembly.dll.refresh) which contains a single line pointing to the location of the real assembly.

Then when you right-click on the Solution and click on Check-In it will not select the assemblies in the "bin" folder and they will not be locked. Although if you click on Check-In from the Team Explorer it will automatically check the assemblies so you have to be careful.

One of the reasons we migrated from Web Site to a Web Application was because it was a real PITA to handle this type of projects with TFS.