Should I add the vcxproj.filter files to source control

Question

While evaluating Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I see that in the converted directory my vcproj files have become vcxproj files. There are also vcxproj.filter files alongside each project which appear to contain a description of the folder structure (\Source Files, \Header Files, etc.).

Do you think these filter files should be kept per-user or should the be shared across the whole dev group and checked into SCC?

My current thinking is to check them in but wondered if there's any reasons not to do that or perhaps good reasons that I should definitely check them in.

The obvious benefit is that the folder structures will match if I'm looking at someone else's machine but maybe they'd like to reorganize things logically??

Answer 1

Previous versions of Visual Studio (at least versions 6.0 and 2008) store that information in their own project file (.dsp and .vcproj files respectively), which of course is good to add to SCC.

I cannot think of any reason to not include this .filter files in SCC

Answer 2

We intentionally pulled the .filter. file information out of the .vcproj when we translated to the .vcxproj MSBuild format. One reason is exactly what you pointed out, that the filters are purely a logical view, and different team members may want different views. The other is that sometimes the build is set up to check the timestamp of the project file, and trigger a rebuild if it has changed - because that may mean there are different source files to build, or different settings, etc. I don't recall if we actually shipped with the build trigging that way, but the idea was that we did not want to trigger a rebuild simply because the filters changed, as they don't affect the build.