Visual Studio 2008 - Moving files at build to bin/

Question

EDIT: This is a VS2008 app written in C#.

So I have a folder in my solution called

_lib/

It's where I keep my DLLs so that when I reference them, they get built into the bin/ folder.

Now I have a new item in my solution. It's a DLL but shouldn't be reference (it's required for a 3rd party app). So on build I want this to be copied from _lib/ to bin/ but NOT referenced in the project.

I've included the _lib/ folder in my app, and for the properties of that DLL I selected always copy. This ALMOST worked, it copies the file with the folder, so my structure looks like:

/bin/_lib/thedll.dll

Instead of

/bin/thedll.dll

Any ideas?

possible duplicate of [Copy to Output Directory copies folder structure but only want to copy files](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1014207/copy-to-output-directory-copies-folder-structure-but-only-want-to-copy-files) — Grant Thomas, Sep 13 '12 at 17:33
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1014207/copy-to-output-directory-copies-folder-structure-but-only-want-to-copy-files](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1014207/copy-to-output-directory-copies-folder-structure-but-only-want-to-copy-files) has the same question with a few different answers. — Ken Wayne VanderLinde, Feb 15 '11 at 01:11
You can go ahead and add more tags as this helped me with C++ too — Shereef Marzouk, Jul 08 '13 at 17:30

Grant Thomas · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-15T01:45:25.920

29

Try following these steps in Visual Studio:

Expand the project tree concerned
Double click the Properties element
In the opened window click the Build Events tab

In the Post-build event command line text area place this:

xcopy "$(ProjectDir)_lib\file.ext" "$(ProjectDir)bin\$(ConfigurationName)"

Open the expected output folder alongside Visual Studio
Hit CTRL+Shift+B to make sure everything is saved and build
Feel the sense of achievement well up inside you as your file appears
:)

Oh, and you can now set Copy to output directory to Do not copy.

edited Feb 15 '11 at 01:45

answered Feb 15 '11 at 01:24

Grant Thomas

44,454
10
85
129

Disappointment: Ahhh my sense of achievement has never been so high! Heh heh :) Thanks for the answer, and it did indeed work. I actually considered doing it as a post build task, but thought "surely there's a setting I can use to just copy it directly" but alas, there's not. Thanks for the confirmation and detailed answer :) – Ev. Feb 15 '11 at 02:51
2

Just making a small edit - added /Y so it overwrites existing files in the output directory. Without this it causes an error after the first build. – Ev. Feb 15 '11 at 03:41

Visual Studio 2008 - Moving files at build to bin/

1 Answers1

Linked

Related