Cleaning Up Visual Studio Solutions, NuGet Restore & MSBuild With Powershell

As some of you may know, I regularly speak at conferences & create courses for Pluralsight.  These types of talks and courses tend to include a lot of demos I distribute afterwards – and I can’t always just put ‘m on GitHub.

So, I need to clean everything up: remove unnecessary files, remove bin/obj folders, remove source control bindings, etc.  Especially for courses this gets tedious very fast (the course I’m currently working on includes more than 100 different visual studio solutions), so I was looking into a way to automate cleaning up the exercise directories, removing source control bindings, and afterwards: check if NuGet package restore works & if the build still works.

Maarten Balliauw pointed me in the right direction: Powershell.  So I started looking around, and found a great post by Daniel Thompson.

It didn’t completely fit my requirements, so I adjusted this somewhat:

• I want to delete all vssscc, user, vspscc etc files
• I also want to delete the v12.suo files (user options) (hidden file, so I added -force)
• Instead of just deleting *.pdb’s, I want to get rid of the complete bin & obj-folders
• I also want to get rid of the packages folder that contain the NuGet packages – as these get restored automatically on first build

Lastly, this specific set of demo files I’m currently working on contain mdf & ldf files (DB) – I don’t want to distribute those for each and every starter/finished demo, but only once so the file download size is as low as possible.  Therefore, I also remove those.

get-childitem . -include *.vssscc,*.user,*.vspscc,

*.v12.suo,*.mdf,*.ldf,debug,packages,bin,obj -recurse -force |   
    %{   
        remove-item $_.fullname -force -recurse   
    }

Up next is removing all the source control bindings from solution & project files (these are coming from Daniel’s post).  I tend to commit all the code I work on to (in this case) TFS Online, but it makes no sense to leave those bindings there when distributing the code: all the end user will get is an annoying “unauthorized to connect to TFS online” message.

# Remove the bindings from the sln files  
get-childitem . -include *.sln -recurse |   
    %{   
        $file = $_;   
        $inVCSection = $False;  
        get-content $file |   
        %{   
            $line = $_.Trim();   
            if ($inVCSection -eq $False -and $line.StartsWith('GlobalSection') -eq $True -and $line.Contains('VersionControl') -eq $True) {   
                $inVCSection = $True   
            }   
            if ($inVCSection -eq $False) {   
                add-content ($file.fullname + '.new') $_   
            }   
            if ($inVCSection -eq $True -and $line -eq 'EndGlobalSection') {   
                $inVCSection = $False  
            }  
        }  
        mv ($file.fullname + '.new') $file.fullname -force   
    } 

# Remove the bindings from the csproj files  
get-childitem . -include *.csproj -recurse |   
    %{   
        $file = $_;   
        get-content $file |   
        %{   
            $line = $_.Trim();   
            if ($line.StartsWith('<Scc') -eq $False) {  
                add-content ($file.fullname + '.new') $_   
            }  
        }  
        mv ($file.fullname + '.new') $file.fullname -force   

    }

That’s it – clean solutions everywhere! 🙂

But, well, I kinda want to be sure package restore & a subsequent build will still work.  So here’s two more scripts I run after having cleaned up everything, just to make sure the demos still work as expected.

First, test if NuGet restore effectively restores everything that has to be restored:

$nuget = "C:\nuget\nuget.exe"
get-childitem . -include *.sln -recurse |   
    %{   

 	$restorepackages = "$nuget restore ""$_"""
	invoke-expression $restorepackages
    }

Next, test if the build still works (/p:VisualStudioVersion=12.0 is required in my case b/c I use WebDeploy to Azure):

$msbuild = "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe"
get-childitem . -include *.sln -recurse |   
    %{   

 	$buildsln = "$msbuild ""$_"" /p:VisualStudioVersion=12.0"
	invoke-expression $buildsln
    }

These two scripts are what I consider a failsafe – afterwards, I run the first set of scripts again to clean

everything up, and then I’m ready to distribute the demos.   As always, your mileage may differ & you might need a few adjustment before using these scripts (these are definitely aimed at my own requirements) – but these work for me, and they should be enough to get you started.

Hope this helps some of you out 🙂