What are the various Build action settings in Visual Studio project properties and what do they do

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For the most part  you just take whatever Visual Studio sets it for you as a default    I m referring to the BuildAction property for each file selected in Solution Explorer  There are a number of options and it s difficult to know what each one of them will do

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Fakes  Part of the Microsoft Fakes  Unit Test Isolation  Framework  Not available on all Visual Studio versions  Fakes are used to support unit testing in your project  helping you isolate the code you are testing by replacing other parts of the application with stubs or shims  More here  https   msdn microsoft com en-us library hh549175 aspx

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In VS2008  the doc entry that seems the most useful is   Windows Presentation Foundation  Building a WPF Application  WPF   ms-help   MS VSCC v90 MS MSDNQTR v90 en wpf conceptual html a58696fd-bdad-4b55-9759-136dfdf8b91c htm  ApplicationDefinition  Identifies the XAML markup file that contains the application definition  a XAML markup file whose root element is Application   ApplicationDefinition is mandatory when Install is true and OutputType is winexe  A WPF application and  consequently  an MSBuild project can only have one ApplicationDefinition   Page  Identifies a XAML markup file whose content is converted to a binary format and compiled into an assembly  Page items are typically implemented in conjunction with a code-behind class   The most common Page items are XAML files whose top-level elements are one of the following   Window  System Windows     Window    Page  System Windows Controls     Page    PageFunction  System Windows Navigation     PageFunction lt  Of  lt  T gt   gt      ResourceDictionary  System Windows     ResourceDictionary    FlowDocument  System Windows Documents     FlowDocument    UserControl  System Windows Controls     UserControl     Resource  Identifies a resource file that is compiled into an application assembly  As mentioned earlier  UICulture processes Resource items   Content  Identifies a content file that is distributed with an application  Metadata that describes the content file is compiled into the application  using AssemblyAssociatedContentFileAttribute

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VS2010 has a property for  Build Action   and also for  Copy to Output Directory    So an action of  None  will still copy over to the build directory if the copy property is set to  Copy if Newer  or  Copy Always    So a Build Action of  Content  should be reserved to indicate content you will access via  Application GetContentStream   I used the  Build Action  setting of  None  and the  Copy to Output Direcotry  setting of  Copy if Newer  for some externally linked  config includes   G

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How about this page from Microsoft Connect  explaining the DesignData and DesignDataWithDesignTimeCreatableTypes  types  Quoting   The following describes the two Build Actions for Sample Data files   Sample data  xaml files must be assigned one of the below Build Actions   DesignData  Sample data types will be created as faux types  Use this Build Action when the sample data types are not creatable or have read-only properties that you want to defined sample data values for   DesignDataWithDesignTimeCreatableTypes  Sample data types will be created using the types defined in the sample data file  Use this Build Action when the sample data types are creatable using their default empty constructor   Not so incredibly exhaustive  but it at least gives a hint  This MSDN walkthrough also gives some ideas  I don t know whether these Build Actions are applicable for non-Silverlight projects also

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Page -- Takes the specified XAML file  and compiles into BAML  and embeds that output into the managed resource stream for your assembly  specifically AssemblyName g resources   Additionally  if you have the appropriate attributes on the root XAML element in the file  it will create a blah g cs file  which will contain a partial class of the  codebehind  for that page  this basically involves a call to the BAML goop to re-hydrate the file into memory  and to set any of the member variables of your class to the now-created items  e g  if you put x Name  foo  on an item  you ll be able to do this foo Background   Purple  or similar   ApplicationDefinition -- similar to Page  except it goes onestep furthur  and defines the entry point for your application that will instantiate your app object  call run on it  which will then instantiate the type set by the StartupUri property  and will give your mainwindow   Also  to be clear  this question overall is infinate in it s results set  anyone can define additional BuildActions just by building an MSBuild Task  If you look in the  systemroot  Microsoft net framework v version   directory  and look at the Microsoft Common targets file  you should be able to decipher many more  example  with VS Pro and above  there is a  Shadow  action that allows you generate private accessors to help with unit testing private classes

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From the documentation      The BuildAction property indicates   what Visual Studio does with a file   when a build is executed  BuildAction   can have one of several values       None - The file is not included in the   project output group and is not   compiled in the build process  An   example is a text file that contains   documentation  such as a Readme file       Compile - The file is compiled into   the build output  This setting is used   for code files       Content - The file is not compiled    but is included in the Content output   group  For example  this setting is   the default value for an  htm or other   kind of Web file       Embedded Resource - This file is   embedded in the main project build   output as a DLL or executable  It is   typically used for resource files

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None  The file is not included in the project output group and is not compiled in the build process  An example is a text file that contains documentation  such as a Readme file  Compile  The file is compiled into the build output  This setting is used for code files  Content  Allows you to retrieve a file  in the same directory as the assembly  as a stream via Application GetContentStream URI   For this method to work  it needs a AssemblyAssociatedContentFile custom attribute which Visual Studio graciously adds when you mark a file as  Content  Embedded resource  Embeds the file in an exclusive assembly manifest resource  Resource  WPF only   Embeds the file in a shared  by all files in the assembly with similar setting  assembly manifest resource named AppName g resources  Page  WPF only   Used to compile a xaml file into baml  The baml is then embedded with the same technique as Resource  i e  available as  AppName g resources  ApplicationDefinition  WPF only   Mark the XAML class file that defines your application  You specify the code-behind with the x Class  Namespace ClassName  and set the startup form page with StartupUri  Window1 xaml  SplashScreen  WPF only   An image that is marked as SplashScreen is shown automatically when an WPF application loads  and then fades DesignData  Compiles XAML viewmodels so that usercontrols can be previewed with sample data in Visual Studio  uses mock types  DesignDataWithDesignTimeCreatableTypes  Compiles XAML viewmodels so that usercontrols can be previewed with sample data in Visual Studio  uses actual types  EntityDeploy   Entity Framework   used to deploy the Entity Framework artifacts CodeAnalysisDictionary  An XML file containing custom word dictionary for spelling rules

[visual-studio] What are the various "Build action" settings in Visual Studio project properties and what do they do?

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