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How do I prevent Visual Studio 2008 from automatically creating the "Mixed Platforms" and "Any CPU" solution configurations? We have "Win32" and "x64" configurations and a developer needs to choose between them. However, as soon as anyone makes any changes to the solution VS automatically creates "Mixed Platforms" and it seems to be the default configuration. This causes a lot of issues, because it turns out some new projects are not selected in this configuration or the wrong project configuration is selected, etc. I just want to stop it doing that and manage the solution configurations myself.

EMP
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3 Answers3

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We see a similar issue with Visual Studio 2005 projects that we want to build both for a Win32 configuration and for a number of distinct smart device platform/configuration combinations.

At arbitrary times, every configuration gets auto-generated for every platform, whether it's valid or not, exploding the size of each of our ~50 project files and causing a lot of work to fix the issue.

It consistently happens when we open the Configuration Manager dialog, and it sometimes (but not always) happens when changing a project setting for a configuration. In the latter case, it seems to be related to manipulating the platform and configuration drop-downs on the project setting dialog.

We filed it as a Visual Studio issue; MSFT closed it as "won't fix".

Tim Lesher
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    Tim, do you have a link? They sometimes fix issues voted for by a lot of people. – Roman Starkov Jan 30 '11 at 13:55
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    This is the issue we filed. Although we originally noted it as happening only when adding a new platform, we later found out that it happens arbitrarily: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/165785/adding-win32-configuration-to-a-smart-device-project-results-in-unuseable-configuration – Tim Lesher Feb 10 '12 at 20:57
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    The same here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/662801/prevent-visual-st – gregseth Sep 05 '12 at 09:28
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    According to Microsoft we can all go .... ourselves. Thank you Microsoft for closing the issue. It's good they had time to put in those UPPERCASE MENUS IN VS 2012. – xxbbcc Oct 26 '12 at 20:25
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    the bug has outlived the documentation. bug still exists, links are now dead. – ROX Apr 25 '18 at 13:34
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I've been dealing with the same sort of problem. I agree it is a mess. I've seen two viable options for dealing with it - neither are really what you want.

  1. Manually remove the configurations that it creates by going to the configuration chooser and picking edit...
  2. By default (at least if I start with a fresh solution in VS 2010) and start creating new projects (both class libraries and apps), you end up with Any CPU, Mixed Platforms, and x86 for your Solution Platforms. Visual Studio seems to do a good job adding new class libraries to both Any CPU and Mixed Platforms (since they default build for the Any CPU target) and adding new apps to both Mixed Platforms and x86 (since the default build for the x86 target), and putting both new class libraries and new apps to Mixed Platforms. So Mixed Platforms ends up being a nice default since it builds everything. I'm not sure why it's not adding new projects for you to Mixed Platforms
aggieNick02
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    We do #1, but with 10+ devs, all with the right to add new projects and 81 projects, this is a hassle tbh. – Casper Leon Nielsen Apr 01 '13 at 13:23
  • Yeah, still the same issue with VS2013. I'm doing #1 too... when I don't forget it. But gosh how often I do forget it and end up struggling why the hell the solution doesn't compile. – Zoltán Tamási Feb 25 '16 at 15:00
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You could filter your .sln files in a commit hook of your source control. So that if you check it in the .sln file and possibly the project files get fixed. The open source Chromium project has such a filter implemented.

frast
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    I suppose so, but that would be a huge hassle and probably quite unreliable. The risk of stuffing up the sln file wouldn't be worth the benefit. – EMP Aug 21 '09 at 01:26