What Visual Studio files should be ignored by subv

Question

I am supporting a number of .Net developers who are using Subversion to version control their work, but we have been running into a number of issues that seem to revolve around the additional files that Visual Studio uses to manage projects, do debugging, etc. Specifically, it seems that these files are causing conflicts due to the fact that they are already in the repo. I know how to get them out and how to handle them, but I need to know what "they" are first.

So, what are the files/directories that Subversion can ignore, and why can they be ignored?(aka. what do those files do?)

This is a large, rather un-organized ASP.Net site and deploying the site is done via. svn updates, so files needed by IIS to dynamically compile (I think that's what it is) the site as files change needs to be left in the repo.

Answer 1

In addition to the ones people have suggested above, I frequently have to ignore *.cache because for some reason I don't know Resharper likes to put it's .cache files in the same folders as the code I work on. Also, I don't think anyone has mentioned *.pdb yet.

Answer 2

• 'bin' directory is a good start (as @Kevin says).
• You would do well to ignore the 'obj' directory too.
• *.suo and *.user would be best left out of source control.
• *.VisualState.xml is going to be personal choice too.
• TestResults.xml (if you're using NUnit)

Answer 3

AnkhSVN does a great job of only checking in the files that are necessary to the project.

Answer 4

• bin and obj directories
• *.user files (MyProject.csproj.user)
• *.suo files

Also, if you are using Visual Studio 2015 the .vs directory.

Answer 5

• *.bin
• *.obj
• *.exe
• *.dll
• *.pch
• *.user
• *.suo
• *.tlb
• TestResults (VSTS unit test directory)

Answer 6

I think a better question would be "What files should I add to Subversion?"

The AnkhSVN 2.0 Subversion integration asks exactly this question to all the projects in your solution. (This question is one of the key parts of the SCC specification.) It will then only suggest adding these files.

As user you can add other files manually (or mark some of the files suggested as ignored), but this behavior makes it very easy to do the right thing.

Most other subversion clients don't have the luxury of talking to a system that really understands what should and shouldn't be added. (E.g. External clients like TortoiseSVN and its frontends can just guess based on file extensions).