Today I am announcing my new app called dotNetTips.Utility Dev App. With this app I combined my previous dev cleaner and dev backup apps into one with more features coming soon.

Clean Visual Studio & SQL Server Temp and Cached Files

This feature will quickly remove temporary and cached files created by Visual Studio and SQL Server. The reason I created this app is because from time to time Visual Studio builds will error for some unexplained reason, especially after getting new source from source control. It’s because these temporary and cached files that are not removed by Visual Studio and can cause these types of issues. After just one day of coding this app can find and delete thousands of files!

This feature will automatically detect where these files are and delete them as long as they are not in use and the user has proper permissions. To help remove some of these issues, the app will stop IIS, SQL Server and other services before deleting files and then restart them after it’s done.

Features

• Auto-detects temporary and cache folders created by Visual Studio and SQL Server
• Fast! Can delete up to 2K files per second!
• It starts and stops Windows services that could prevent files from being cleaned.

I’ve gotten a few questions on why a Visual Studio developer needs this feature. Here is why… on June 21, 2016 all of a sudden I was getting 206 unit test failures after getting the latest files from source control. I ran this utility and ran the unit tests again. I then got zero failures.

Also, once I updated all NuGet packages in a solution and it wouldn’t build anymore. Ran this app and then it built fine!

Quickly Backup Source Code

This feature will quickly backup your Visual Studio code files. I use this feature to backup source files before retrieving source from source control (since some of these programs wipe out code changes) and at the end of the day.

When the first backup is triggered and then every 7 days (default), this feature will scan all of your drives for source code. For every folder found, it will ask you if you want to add that folder to the backup process. There is even a “turbo backup” that will backup files with the archive flag set.

This feature will backup files to your OneDrive folder so they will be in the cloud (location can be changed via the config file). By default, this feature will remove any backup folders older than 7 days.

*** Install is broken, working on the fix.