Why is Clean Project not a first class citizen

I know this seems trivial, but since my move to the .NET world in Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), I sorely miss features from Visual C++ functionality.  Now before I get to my point I want to give a little overview of how VS.NET works before getting to for those that don't know much about VS.NET. I will generalise and I of course don't work for the VS.NET team.

The VS.NET teams are all separate. Now this is because VS.NET is an extensible IDE.  Not only do you have the Add-In model, you also have the VSIP functionality (which is my favorite and really gives the best explanation of how this works).   The VSIP feature allows you to write packages.  Packages are just plug-ins for the IDE that perform specific work (either UI or non-UI).   For example Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual Basic .NET are all packages.  This is why you can buy different versions of each product and get the same consistent look and feel.  Now because each package is unique and separate, you get different functionality across the packages (aka refactoring in C#, unit testing in only the Burton Package etc).

Now back to my original point : Scott Hanselman has a post about a tool that allows you rid yourself of the files in the bin / obj directories.  Why should we need this?  VS.NET lists this menu item happily in my C# projects, but amazingly enough it doesn't do a darn thing.  Seems a bit silly and trivial and yes there are bigger problems in the world to solve, but I miss clean.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 10, 2004
  It doesn't work? That's pretty odd.
  
  The clean feature doesn't seem to be in VS2003, but selecting Clean in C# Express removes files that are compiled by the project.