In Visual Studio, what does the "Clean" command do?

visual-studio build-process
Arnis Lapsa picture Arnis Lapsa · Oct 21, 2009 · Viewed 40.1k times · Source

You know, the one that outputs this=>

------ Clean started: Project: Foo.Bar, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
========== Clean: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

What it is cleaning?

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Oct 21, 2009

The output directories - it removes the code that it's previously built.

It doesn't remove the bin/obj directories themselves (or the Debug/Release directories beneath them), just the actual .exe, .dll, etc files. Unfortunately this makes it less useful for my usual use of cleaning up output directories: when I want to zip up the source code. As the Clean action doesn't do this, I usually just delete the bin and obj directories directly.

Related questions

How to run Visual Studio post-build events for debug build only

How can I limit my post-build events to running only for one type of build? I'm using the events to copy DLL files to a local IIS virtual directory, but I don't want this happening on the build server in …

Read More
Using CMake to generate Visual Studio C++ project files

I am working on an open source C++ project, for code that compiles on Linux and Windows. I use CMake to build the code on Linux. For ease of development setup and political reasons, I must stick to Visual Studio …

Read More
How can I make Visual Studio's build be very verbose?

I need to get a hold of every flag, every switch used in the build process by the Visual Studio binaries. I tried to obtain a verbose output by using vcbuild, but I wasn't able. What do I have to …

Read More