How to fully clean bin and obj folders within Visual Studio?

If you right click on a folder, you will see a "Clean" menu item. I assumed this would clean (remove) the obj and bin directory. However, as far as I can see, it does nothing. Is there another way? (please don't tell me to go to Windows Explorer or the cmd.exe) I'd like to remove the obj and bin folder so that I can easily zip the whole thing.

Solution 1:

As others have responded already Clean will remove all artifacts that are generated by the build. But it will leave behind everything else.

If you have some customizations in your MSBuild project this could spell trouble and leave behind stuff you would think it should have deleted.

You can circumvent this problem with a simple change to your .*proj by adding this somewhere near the end :

<Target Name="SpicNSpan"
        AfterTargets="Clean">
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(OUTDIR)"/>
</Target>

Which will remove everything in your bin folder of the current platform/configuration.

------ Edit Slight evolution based on Shaman's answer below (share the votes and give him some too)

<Target Name="SpicNSpan"  AfterTargets="Clean">
    <!-- Remove obj folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" />
    <!-- Remove bin folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseOutputPath)" />
</Target>

---- Edit again with parts from xDisruptor but I removed the .vs deletion as this would be better served in a .gitignore (or equivalent)

Updated for VS 2015.

<Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
     <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
     <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
</Target>

He also provides a good suggestion on making the task easier to deploy and maintain if you have multiple projects to push this into.

If you vote this answer be sure to vote them both as well.

Solution 2:

If you are using git and have a correct .gitignore in your project, you can

git clean -xdf --dry-run

to remove absolutely every file on the .gitignore list, i.e. it will clean obj, and bin folders (the x triggers this behavior)

Note: The parameter --dry-run will only simulate the operation ("Would remove ...") and show you what git would delete. Try it with dry-run, then remove the parameter and it will really delete the files+folders.

Optionally, after that clean command, you can use dotnet restore mySolution.sln to get all the NUGET packages restored. And if you have a developer console open anyway,
you can quickly run msbuild -m mySolution.sln afterwards (without having Visual Studio open) to see if it was successful.

Solution 3:

For Visual Studio 2015 the MSBuild variables have changed a bit:

  <Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(SolutionDir).vs" /> <!-- .vs -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
  </Target>

Notice that this snippet also wipes out the .vs folder from the root directory of your solution. You may want to comment out the associated line if you feel that removing the .vs folder is an overkill. I have it enabled because I noticed that in some third party projects it causes issues when files ala application.config exist inside the .vs folder.

Addendum:

If you are into optimizing the maintainability of your solutions you might want to take things one step further and place the above snippet into a separate file like so:

  <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
       <Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(SolutionDir).vs" /> <!-- .vs -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
       </Target>
  </Project>

And then include this file at the very end of each and every one of your *.csproj files like so:

     [...]
     <Import Project="..\..\Tools\ExtraCleanup.targets"/>
  </Project>

This way you can enrich or fine-tune your extra-cleanup-logic centrally, in one place without going through the pains of manually editing each and every *.csproj file by hand every time you want to make an improvement.