Removing Source Control bindings from Visual Studio Projects Utility

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Removing Source Control bindings from Visual Studio Projects Utility

Saveen Reddy's blog - A Tool to Remove Source Control Bindings from Visual Studio Solutions and Projects

"Ever need to share your Visual Studio solution or projects with someone?

You ZIP up a folder with your code and send it. If your project is under source control – one that is integrated with Visual Studio – you will likely hear from the recipient of your code. They will be complaining that the get weird warnings from Visual Studio when they load the solution and projects.

What we need is a simple way to strip out all the source control bindings before we distribute the code.

Fortunately I spend a few hours creating one. It is called VSUnbindSourceControl and it is now on codeplex: https://vsunbindscc.codeplex.com/

More details are at the CodePlex Project, but the short summary of usage is this.

Copy your solution to a new directory (because the tool does modify files)

Run this command: VSUnbindSourceControl.exe d:\myfolder

..."

I find it interesting how this kind of utility seems to come around every so often (Sounds like a good candidate for inclusion in VS or as a power tool...). I first highlighted a like utility back in 2005 (almost to the day, which is kind of weird), Clean Sources Plus Utility. Then again in 2006, SolutionZipper - VS2005 Addin to Clean and Zip in One Step and more recently in 2011, Sharing your Visual Studio Projects cleanly with CleanProject.

Anyway, options are good and things, and VS versions, so another choice is okay. Plus being source available is nice... :)