Month: December 2013
Automatically finding missing and duplicate files in CSProj (Revisited)
As promised in I have come back to the problem of detecting errors in Visual Studio project files. I have updated the script to now report CS files that are on disk that do not appear in the list of included (and compiled) files in the Project. This has a few limitations, including that it only works with CS files (although the script could be easily amended to look for any file extension you like).
Starting afresh
Some of you may know that I recently started a new position at asos.com. I meant to write about my experiences here a lot earlier, but free time has not exactly been in abundance these last two months. In short: the codebase has its problems but I’m really enjoying it.
First of all: the environment. The ASOS offices are located in Camden, London. This is a cool place to be (the eating to be had around here is simply amazing) and is a convenient 10-minute walk > 15-minute train ride > 10-minute walk from my house (not a bad commute for central London!). The offices are not quite as nice as those at my last company, but that place was pretty hard to top:
-
- The main atrium
-
- The escalators up from reception to the “Sky Lounge”
-
- The reception for my floor
.
Asos looks more like this:
-
- Upstairs seating area
-
- Behind the reception
-
- The cafeteria
-
- The main atrium
Automatically finding missing and duplicate files in CSProj
It’s not uncommon for your CSProj files to become corrupted, or at least invalidated, during a merge. This typically happens when merging two relatively large pieces of work and often takes the form of:
- Files referenced in the CSProj that do not exist on disk
- Files that exist on disk, are needed for the project to compile but are not included in the CSProj
- Files that are on disk and are included, but multiple times
Since this can be quite a pain to fix (the process involves loading the project in Visual Studio and trying to build, getting an error in the concerned project, fixing and trying again) I wrote a simple Powershell script that will analyse your CSProj file and will return all the duplicate file includes as well as all the included files that do not exist on disk. This is a solution for points 1 and 3 above only, as point 2 (finding files on disk that are not included in the CSProj) is a slightly harder problem. I will come back to that in a later revision of the script.
This works well (it’s extremely simple) at displaying errors in your Proj file, but so far you must actually solve the problems manually. It strikes me that actually fixing the CSProj file could also be done automatically, so I am going to revisit this soon (any automatic fixes will, of course, be displayed before they are actually performed and will require the user’s consent to continue).
Here’s the script, I’ll see you back here soon for the two extra features mentioned above.
Param(
[string]$filePath = $(throw "You must supply a file path")
)
$xml = ([xml] ( gc $filePath ))
$filesIncluded = $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Compile | select -ExpandProperty Include
$invalidPaths = foreach($path in $filesIncluded)
{
$fullPath = Join-Path (split-path $filePath) $path
if(-not (test-path $fullPath)){
$path
}
}
$uniquePaths = $filesIncluded | select –unique
$duplicatePaths = Compare-object –referenceobject $uniquePaths –differenceobject $filesIncluded `
| select -ExpandProperty InputObject
if($invalidPaths)
{
""
"---- Invalid paths ----"
$invalidPaths
}
if($duplicatePaths)
{
""
"---- Duplicate paths ----"
$duplicatePaths
}
if((-not $invalidPaths) -and (-not $duplicatePaths))
{
"=> No errors found in $filePath"
}
""
Richiban 