Scenarios for Visual Studio's ‘Clean Solution’ Option

Question

My understanding is that Rebuild = Clean + Build. What are the likeliest reasons for offering ‘Clean Solution’ as a separate option, since rebuild does the same thing? I gave it some thought, and the only reason I could come up with was that some solutions can be fairly large and it may be time-consuming to do a clean AND a rebuild, but if you do a clean you'd have to (re)build anyway, right? Thanks, and happy holidays to all.

Answer 1

Clean Solution is like msbuild /t:clean and make clean, so it's useful in the same situations.

• Your build is a little broken, such that a generated file is placed in a common directory. When you switch configurations, you first clean the old configuration and then build the new one.

• You want to send someone a copy of your solution

• You don't have source control, but you want to checkpoint your solution before continuing

• You are modifying your project files by hand and want to make sure they work properly

• You created a new solution, worked on it for a day, and are now ready to put it in source control. Before you "add all files", you want to remove the generated files.

• You are short on disk space, and want to discard unnecessary files. Suppose you have a small SSD and several large solutions, or if you want to change configurations.

Answer 2

I've used it several times to cleanup a new project before committing it to a repository (svn, or TFS).

Answer 3

I could only come up with one :(

If you want to zip your solution directory, and don't want to include all the temporary files/compiled binaries/etc ?

Answer 4

Clean gets rid of all the object files, so:

• you can clean and then copy the project's files without the object files being included in your copy (although clean may still leave some compiler-generated files around).
• you can do a release build occasionally (e.g. once a month) and then clean it away to get rid of the clutter in your project until the next time you need to build it.
• You can do a clean and then build and do something else in between
• You can do a clean when you want to quickly make sure that the next build will be a full rebuild, but when you don't want to start the build now (e.g. clean the project before you go home to be sure that you won't forget to do a rebuild in the morning when you start work)
• You can clean multiple projects (libraries etc) before you go back and build them - so you know you have a truly clean build, rather than several rebuilds that may have been affected by old junk that was lying aroud in a referenced library (ok, this one is grasping at straws - as long as you rebuild the dependencies before the dependants it shouldn't matter :-)

Having said that, clean isn't really useful very often - especially as free disk space becomes ever bigger, the pressures of olden days (e.g. keeping your project on a floppy disk and making enough room available to continue working) are no longer relevant.