Visual Studio - Post-build event to merge .cs files

Question

My target environment only accepts .cs files and complies them at run time.

My project has gui.cs and 4 other class files. Its about 9000 lines of code.

Is there a way to have all 5 files merged into 1 cs file as a post build event?

Answer 1

Why do you need a single .cs file? If you're trying to create a single class you could use partial classes... although it doesn't sound like a terribly good idea if you've got 9000 lines of code.

How do you want the merge to happen? If it's just straight concatenation:

copy Foo.cs + Bar.cs Output.cs

I suspect you'll want something a bit smarter though - in which case you should write a small tool to do the merge, and then run that tool in the post-build event.

Can you give us more details of why you want to do this though? There may be a better approach.

Answer 2

There is nothing in built to do this. But building a tool should be easy enough.

Other than using directives, which have to be included at the top, you should be able to just append the files.

As a duplicate using directive is only a warning:

1. Capture leading using statements into the start of your output from each file.
2. Add the remainder of each file in turn to the output.

E.g. the following compiles, with just one warning, for the duplicate using:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System;

namespace ConsoleApplication1 {
  class X1 {
    public static void Do() {
      Console.WriteLine("Hello world");
    }
  }
}

namespace ConsoleApplication1 {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      X1.Do();
    }
  }
}