Cleaning up Visual Studio

Why would you ever need a tool to clean up Visual Studio? Doesn’t Visual Studio have a built in “clean” mode that cleans your build directories?

Yes, it does, but that only cleans the file created by compiling and linking your software. Visual Studio also creates other files. How do you get rid of those files? Look them up, then search for them manually? That’s going to be time consuming.

Why would you even want to delete these extra files?

We’ve also seen Visual Studio crash from time to time. Sometimes it’s a plugin or extension gone astray, but other times it’s when you do something harmless like load a project or workspace or solution. What we found was that in many cases, just deleting the extra files would prevent future crashes.

So we wrote Visual Studio Project Cleaner to do that. The first version of the tool was written to work with Visual Studio 6, but we’ve updated it to also cleanup so of the files created by the newer versions of Visual Studio, Visual Lint and Visual Studio Project Fixer.

What type of file can we clean?

• aps. Last Resource editor state.
• bak. Backup file.
• bsc. Source browser database.
• dbg. Debugging information.
• exp. Exports file.
• idb. Minimum rebuild linker file.
• ilk. Incremental linker file.
• ipch. Incremental precompiled header file.
• lastbuildstate. Build helper.
• log. Build log.
• map. Linker MAP file.
• ncb. Intellisense database.
• obj. Object file.
• opt. Visual Studio options.
• pch. Pre-compiled header file.
• res. Compiled resource script.
• sbr. Source browser information.
• sdf. Intellisense database.
• tlog. Depdenency file information.

We can also clean the following file types (these are disabled by default).

• lib. Library file.
• dll. Dynamic Link Library.
• exe. Executable.
• pdb. Program database.
• old. Visual Studio upgrade files.
• Visual Lint files in .visualint directories.
• Visual Studio Project Fixer backup files (*.vcxproj-YYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS)

Clean your Visual Studio

We’ve been using Visual Studio Project Cleaner for years to clean unwanted files. It turns a tedious job into a simple and easy job.

Clean your files today with Visual Studio Project Cleaner.