How to move a Visual C++ Workspace

[Frank J. Lhota]

I have several MS Visual C++ workspaces that I need to move to another
folder, i.e. I have some workspaces in subdirectories of D:\Prog1\Work, and
I need to transfer them to subdirectories of T:\Prog2\Demo. Doing this
turned out to be trickier than I thought.

Visual Studio has the "Save As..." menu item for individual files, but the
program provides nothing like "Save As..." for Projects or Workspaces. I
tried the brute force approach of simply copying the directories to the
destination, but the copied workspaces did not build, due to complaints
about the program database. I tried deleting the program database files (the
ones with the extension *.pdb and *.idb) in hopes that they would be
recreated by the build procedures. That didn't work, same complaint about
the program database. I opened the program database files and saw that they
did include the full path names for the various project sources. Moreover,
the program database files are binary, so one cannot simply edit the path
names without messing things up. (Yes, I tried it. No, it didn't work.)

At times like this, I envy the Gnu C++ folks. I cannot believe that there is
no simple way to do this! Is there some tool for moving Visual C++
workspaces? Is there some way to repair the program databases? Any help you
could provide would be much appreciated.

 

[David B. Held]

[...]
Any help you could provide would be much appreciated.

My help is to suggest checking out one of the Microsoft
newsgroups for your compiler, as they are most likely to be
able to answer your questions.

Dave

 

[Moonlit]

Hi,

Funny, at one time I too had problems copying the workspaces, I noticed the
path was contained in one of the files. However a few months ago I build a
new system copied everything over from the old system (new drive letter, new
OS and new path) and I could compile every project without a problem.

I did clean everything out though. You should be able to do this using the
(I believe Tools Batch or Tools Clean menu, I forgot the exact name) and it
will delete most (maybe all) of the files for you. There are a lot of files
you can delete *.ilk *.pch (once I had a list of all of them but
unfortunately that list is on another system) I think in the documentation
(look for ilk or something) there is a description of which files are
generated and thus save to delete.

Try the batch-clean first if that doesn't work clean the directories out by
hand (don't really believe the latter is necessary).

Regards, Ron AF Greve