Deleting all bin and obj folders from a solution

Quick little post.

Since reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas I've been looking for ways to automate tasks whenever I find myself doing something I know I'm going to repeat later or I'm repeating right there and then.

The other day I was working on a VisualStudio Solution someone else had started and when trying to build it found they had checked in some of the bin and obj folders.

So I open up the root folder of the solution and prepare to trawl through about a dozen projects to delete all the bin and obj files. Obviously noticing that I'm about to do the same steps repeatedly and this will happen in the future I went and did a quick search to see if anyone else had already solved this.

Awesomely someone had.

So a huge thanks to Glenn at Development on a shoestring for providing exactly what I needed. I'm putting this here just in case his site should disappear and take the knowledge with it.

I threw the following into a powershell script that sits in source control ready for use in the future

# Iterate through all subdirectories and delete all bin and obj folders
# http://blog.slaven.net.au/2006/11/22/use-powershell-to-delete-all-bin-obj-folders/
# Had to use it for getting rid of a bunch of bin and obj folders in a PoC but thought it smart to put in here for other to use
Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin,obj -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse }

RemoveAllBinAndObjFolders.ps1