Wrongly created output folders with Visual Studio 2008

Question

Hello,

I have a solution with many projects. There is actually a Core project and a few plugins. I changed OutputPath for all plugins so all binaries end up in the Core bin\debug folder. (this is necessary as the Core do not have a reference on plugins, hence it does not "include" plugins binaries when it is compiled.)

So basically my folder structure is as follow:

Solution
  MySolution.sln
  Plugin1\
  Plugin2\
  Core\bin\debug

Each plugin OutputPath is "..\Core\bin\debug". When I open the solution Visual Studio creates a folder "Core\bin\debug" in Solution's folder parent as if the relative path starts from .sln file. However when I build the solution the binaries are output to the correct path ("Solution\Core\bin\debug").

Core\bin\debug

It looks like a Visual Studio bug to me, but maybe I overlooked some option somewhere. Any ideas how to resolve this problem ?

PS: I know this not a critical issue as everything build and works fine, however I dislike the idea of meaningless folder hanging around

Answer 1

Rather than changing the output location of the plug-ins, what you could do is create a post-build script (Properties \ Build Events tab) for them that will copy the them to the Core folder. That would prevent the confusion with output folders.

This command line should do the trick for you:

copy "$(TargetPath)" "$(SolutionDir)Core\$(OutDir)"

If you need to copy .pdb and .config files as well, you can add more lines:

copy "$(TargetPath).pdb" "$(SolutionDir)Core\$(OutDir)"
copy "$(TargetPath).config" "$(SolutionDir)Core\$(OutDir)"

If you really want to do it with a single line, this should also work, though it's not as clean:

copy "$(TargetPath)*" "$(SolutionDir)Core\$(OutDir)"

If you're not using the same output path in both the main project and the add-ons, you'll need to replace $(OutDir) with a hard-coded value. If you have them set to target the typical "\bin\Debug" folder (or have just left the defaults in place), then you can get away with using the $(OutDir) value.

Answer 2

Instead of using "..\Core\bin\debug", use "$(SolutionDir)\Core\bin\debug".