I am releasing a beta version of VSProjectZipper. This tool will allow you to right-click on a Visual Studio project or solution in Windows Explorer and zip it up and, if desired, email it to somebody.
Zipping a project works exactly as you would expect. VSProjectZipper reads the project file and creates a zip file that mirrors the directory structure for the project.
However, if you zip up a solution, VSProjectZipper will create it's own directory structure. Basically the sln file is in the root of the zip file and each project has it's own directory. Solution items are also included and placed into directories. Just to reiterate, it doesn't matter where projects or solution items are on the local file system, the zip file will create it's own directory structure for them.
The installer also adds a shortcut to your start menu to configure it. There are a number of options that you can change.
Before you get too excited, you should remember that this is just a beta and there are many known (and I'm sure unknown) issues. Here are the issues that I know of (at least remember at the time of writing this :):
- Limited testing. I only tested on a single, very simple VB project and a moderately complex C# project and solution as well as a single, simple installer project.
- Project references are not copied. If you reference an assembly, that assembly is not included in the zip file. This could give compiler errors in the extracted project.
- Hint paths are not removed or modified. This could also give compiler errors on the extracted project.
- Test projects can have compiler errors upon extraction. If an accessor is created for a MS test project, you will get compiler errors.
I'm sure there's plenty more errors as well, but it seems to have worked ok for my BizArk project. I started getting bored with this project so I figured I had better release it before I decided to stop working on it.