Cleaning up intermediate temporary files

By , on February 9th, 2009

Preparing the source and binaries for delivery is often tedious task especially if you’ve lot of components and source files to deliver. Removing it’s temporary files created by compiler and linker is even harder.

I’ve been using Michael Dunn’s cool cleanup utility for long time to smoothen my project deliveries, which is freely available through codeproject.

The utility contains most of the temporary file extensions and if you wish to some more, it’s possible through it’s configuration window. The coolest thing is that, it’s integrated with Shell. So you can just right click on the folder and opt for cleaning. Cool no?

I advice to read the entire article OK, just read the below quote () taken from his original article before downloading the tool.(That’s why given the links to download at the end)

Important note for VS.NET users

On the NT-based OSes, the way that the shell handles extensions of more than 3 characters will cause problems for C# projects. The default behavior of the shell makes the wildcard *.res match .RESX files (it only compares the first three characters), and deleting the .RESX files will delete some resource information.

So, to avoid deleting those files, you can either remove *.res from the list of files to delete, or go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ FileSystem, and set the DWORD value Win95TruncatedExtensions to 0, then restart your computer. See KB article Q164351 for more info on this feature.