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What is the .vs folder used for exactly? It gets created at the base folder of my solution. I can see some hidden files and different files appear for different projects. I'm having a hard time chasing up official documentation on it.

bernieslearnings
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3 Answers3

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Even though there is no specific documentation, there was a similar question here

Usually, .vs folder is required by Visual Studio to store opened documents, breakpoints, and other information about state of your solution. which means It contains typical files like,

  • Temporary caches used by Roslyn for IntelliSense.
  • IIS Express applicationHost.config file.
  • Many other possible files (you are welcome to edit this answer to include what you know of).
Lex Li
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Sajeetharan
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While not a direct answer to this question, I thought I'd share that I recently had an issue in my ASP.Net Core website where routing appeared to be completely broken with no code changes. What's more, I tried deleting views/razor pages and it was still incorrectly loading an old view, presumably cached. But whenever I switched to the console launch setting, the issue went away.

I then recalled that in rare cases the .vs folder can sometimes cause IIS Express to become corrupt, so I closed VS, deleted the .vs folder, re-started and launched the website with the IIS setting and everything worked again.

santos
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Similarly to santos, this is not a direct answer to this question but I have found that deleting the .vs folder can sometimes get you out of trouble when all else fails!

See this question that I asked a year ago for an example of where deleting this folder fixed the problem of duplicate tests that were showing up for me in Visual studio Visual Studio 2019 showing duplicate tests in Test Explorer

Mike
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