Can Someone explain the Purpose of the different Build Actions in VS 2008?

Question

At first I was just looking for the difference between Resource and Embedded Resource; then I noticed all these other Build Action types: Compile, Content, Embedded Resource, ApplicationDefinition, Page, Resource, SplashScreen, and EntityDeploy.

I understand some of these but some are more vague and a clearcut definition would be helpful in addition to some examples of when you might use each.

Thank you,

Answer 1

All of the build actions correspond to MSBUILD ItemGroups. If you open your .csproj file in Notepad, you'll see a list of your sources like this:

 <ItemGroup>
    <Compile Include="Accounts._ORMCustomToolReport.cs"/>
    <Compile Include="Class1.cs" />
 </ItemGroup>

There are MSBUILD targets that process the particular ItemGroups in particular ways. In particular, for a C# project, the "Compile" ItemGroup will be compiled by the CSC compiler.

Answer 2

Compile: Pretty self explanatory. Visual studio should try to compile the code. (cs, vb code files)
Content: Required file for deployment. (ASPX, ASCX pages, Readme files etc.)
Embedded Resource: Embeds the file into the assembly DLL. (nHibernate mappings typically, any sort of content that you don't want to be separated from the assembly)