Asked by reader. Answered by the Wonk on November 18, 2002

A.

VS.NET has this great feature that takes an app.config file in the root of a project and copies it to the output of the project at build-time, renaming the file to <projectName>.exe.config, as per .NET requirements. However, it doesn’t do that for any other type of file, e.g. app.manifest. Likewise, VS.NET 2002 provides no capacity in C# or VB.NET projects to do anything custom at different parts of the project build cycle, like pre-build or post-build, where you could do these kinds of things yourself. If you happen to have a version of VS.NET that provides C++ project types, you can create a C++ Makefile project, change it to a Utility project, add your shell commands in pre-build or post-build events and, using VS.NET build dependencies, make your C++ Utility project execute at the right time during the build process.

However, as you might be able to tell from the description, this is a bit of a hack. Luckily, in VS.NET 2003, the latest version that supports the .NET Framework 1.1 and available in beta version to MSDN subscribers, C# projects allow you to add your shell commands to the pre-build and post-build events during the project build. Access to the project build event settings are available via Project->Properties->Common Properties->Build Events. Figure 1 shows the copying of an app.manifest file to the output directory based on the project name.

Figure 1: VS.NET 2003 C# project pre-build and post-build event handling

Notice the use of variables in Figure 1:

copy $(ProjectDir)app.manifest $(ProjectDir)$(OutDir)$(ProjectName)$(TargetExt).manifest

You can type these in from memory, or you can press the “…” button to show the event command line editor dialog, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Build event command line editor dialog