Find and remove duplicate entries in csproj file

Question

We recently merged two branches of code and ended up with duplicate entries for several of the files in the .csproj file. This seemed to happen to all the files which needed the Copy to Output Directory to be changed to Copy always after that change was made and merged with the other branch.

I was wondering if this is going to cause any unexpected problems if it is left like this and what I should do to fix it. It's a lot of files so I don't want to go through and do it for each file manually. It is also not all of the files, but it is a significant number of files. What should I do?

Crippen

Do you mean some files file not perform a merge process? Are you use the default merge tool in VS? Could you share a screenshot as I never saw this issue before? Check this case to see whether it is helpful: #14200984 – Crin

I don't mean some files file not perform a merge process. I am using the default merge tool in Visual Studio but I didn't do the merge that cause the issue it was another developer on my team. I assume they use the default merge tool as well. I can't add a screenshot because the files and names are proprietary. The link wasn't helpful because it just suggested using a different merge tool in the first place but the damage is already done. – Crippen

Answer 1

What I ended up doing was to remove all the files from the project that were affected, refreshed the solution explorer and showed all files including ones no longer in the project, and then re-included the files to the project.

The first time I tried I didn't refresh the solution explorer and it didn't change anything, but after refreshing and toggling show/hide all files a few times after removing them from the project, including them back only added a reference to them once instead of the twice that I was seeing.

What really made this quick was that I could select all the files I wanted to work with by using shift-click and ctrl-click and then right clicking to perform whatever action on them as a group, such as excluding from the project, including in the project, or changing the copy to output directory setting.

Crippen

Has it always been this easy? Wow. – Figuration

Answer 2

In case someone else is looking for a way to do that automatically, I put together a script for this: RemoveCsProjDuplicates.ps1

The script will find all csproj files in the supplied folder, remove all duplicates and save the file.

To use just run

.\RemoveCsProjDuplicates.ps1 -filePath [Solution folder]

Feel free to use and adapt it to your needs

Limited

Nice use of the XML handling features of PowerShell to easily find the duplicate modules and remove them. Thanks. – Benedetto

Nice, I had to add + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Analyzer for it to remove a lot of duplicate analyzer entries. – Farrica

Answer 3

I used rodrigoff's .ps1 file (thanks!) but I had to modify it for my project to compile because it did not search for all entries in the csproj file, it was searching only for Compile and Content i changed this line of code:

 $entries = $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Compile + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Content | Group-Object Include

to:

 $entries = $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Compile + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Content +$xml.Project.ItemGroup.Reference + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.EmbeddedResource + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.None + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Page + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Resource + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.ProjectReference + $xml.Project.ItemGroup.Folder | Group-Object Include

Intensifier

Answer 4

I used the following LinqPad script to do the same as the powershell script

var proj = XDocument.Load(@"c:\path_to_your.csproj");

var items = proj.Descendants()
.Where(d => d.Name.LocalName == "Compile" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Reference" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "EmbeddedResource" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "ProjectReference" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Resource" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Content" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Folder" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Page" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "Analyzer" ||
    d.Name.LocalName == "None"  )
.SelectMany(d => d.Attributes()
.Where(a => a.Name.LocalName == "Include")
.Select(a => a.Value))
.ToLookup(p => p, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);

items.Where(i => i.Count() > 1).Dump("Duplicates");

Carmichael