Related files support

C# and VB have a registration API for automatically registering dependency relationship between files so that they are automatically parented underneath and hidden in some cases.

For example, in VB, Foo.Designer.cs and Foo.resx is automatically grouped under Foo.cs, and both are hidden by default.

We should implement similar support - but I’d like to see an MSBuild equivalent of this - not via the registry as it is today:

See: CVbPackage::InitializeRelatedFiles and CCSharpPackage::InitializeRelatedFiles internally.

We should make sure that we have sensible defaults that do not require DependantUpon metadata item to be written to the project file.

[NickCraver]

@MovGP0 FWIW, you can shorten that greatly in MSBuild 15+, like this:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Update="appsettings.Development.json" DependentUpon="appsettings.json" />
    <Content Update="appsettings.Staging.json" DependentUpon="appsettings.json" />
  </ItemGroup>

…and if using an SDK project, further with wildcards:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Update="appsettings.*.json" DependentUpon="appsettings.json" />
  </ItemGroup>

Of course the configurable version is much better, but it’s at least a lot better manually in .csproj due to other changes there already.

[MovGP0]

Just for your info: you can configure file nesting manually using the <DependentUpon> attribute.

Ie. for the appsettings.json, this would look like the following in your .csproj file:

  <ItemGroup>
    <None Remove="appsettings*.json" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Include="appsettings.json" />
    <Content Include="appsettings.Development.json">
      <DependentUpon>appsettings.json</DependentUpon>
    </Content>
    <Content Include="appsettings.Staging.json" >
      <DependentUpon>appsettings.json</DependentUpon>
    </Content>
  </ItemGroup>

I agree that this should be detected automatically by default.