How do I exclude files/folders from a .NET Core/Standard project?

Question

In .NET Core and .NET Standard projects, if you put files and folders within the project directory, they are automatically picked up by Visual Studio; essentially they are p

Answer 1

Open the project in Visual Studio, and right click the files and folders in Solution Explorer. Choose Exclude from Project.

That's exactly what you do for projects targeting .NET Framework.

Answer 2

Just to be complete, if you're using ItemGroup to exclude folder, then:

<ItemGroup>
  <Content Remove="excluded_folder\**" />
  <Compile Remove="excluded_folder\**" />
  <EmbeddedResource Remove="excluded_folder\**" />
  <None Remove="excluded_folder\**" />
</ItemGroup>

Because, I had an angular project with the node_modules folder which had very long paths and VS kept throwing exceptions. And using <Content Remove="node_modules\**\*" /> didn't work.

Answer 3

There are also a few things you can do in the csproj files to make sure the files aren't picked up:

1) Make sure none of the globbing patterns that look for "project items" pick up the files:

<PropertyGroup>
  <DefaultItemExcludes>$(DefaultItemExcludes);your_nonproj.file;a\**\*.pattern</DefaultItemExcludes>
</PropertyGroup>

2) Remove items explicitly:

<ItemGroup>
  <None Remove="hidden.file" />
  <Content Remove="wwwroot\lib\**\*" />
</ItemGroup>

Note that, on large directories (number of files), using DefaultItemExcludes with the folder\** pattern is a lot faster since msbuild will skip walking the directory entirely. Using a remove for this will still let msbuild spend quite some time discovering files.