Check for missing files in Visual Studio solution

TeamCity uses MSBuild to build VisualStudio solutions. If MSBuild fails - build on TeamCity fails. So, for the files that are consumed by compiler it comes oout-of-the box.
For resource files there is no way of providing such detection, as they are neither consumed, nor inspected by compiler and MSBuild

This is what i was afraid of.
I now did create a unit test for this. It scans all project files, and check that all files are where they must be.
It's a a hack, but it's ok for me.
If one of our devs forget to add and commit a file in sourcontrol which was previously added in visual studio, this unittest will fail.

[TestClass]
    public class SolutionCheckTest
    {
        //static namespace used for xml resolution
        readonly XNamespace csprojNamespace = XNamespace.Get("http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003");

        [TestMethod]
        public void TestMethod1()
        {
            //load the solution file with full path
            string solutionFile = this.GetSolutionFile("MySolution.sln");
            //load a list of all projects
            List<string> projects = this.GetAllProjects(solutionFile);
            //list of all missing files. Will be used only if there any
            List<string> missingFiles = new List<string>();

            foreach (var project in projects)
            {
                FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(project);
                XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(project);

                foreach (var element in xdoc.Descendants(this.csprojNamespace + "ItemGroup").Descendants()
                    .Where(x => x.Name == this.csprojNamespace + "Content" | x.Name == this.csprojNamespace + "Compile"))
                {
                    string fileMustExist = element.Attribute("Include").Value;
                    //the ' character which can occur in filenames is encoded in xml, and needs to be unencoded for comparison 
                    fileMustExist = fileMustExist.Replace("%27", "'");
                    if (!File.Exists(Path.Combine(fi.DirectoryName, fileMustExist)))
                    {
                        missingFiles.Add(string.Format("Project: {0}, Filename: {1}", fi.Name, fileMustExist));
                    }
                }
            }

            //If missingFiles.Count is bigger than 0, this means there are missing files
            //All missing files are then put into one fail output message
            if (missingFiles.Count > 0)
            {
                string output = "The following files are missing:" + Environment.NewLine;
                foreach (var missingFile in missingFiles)
                {
                    output += missingFile + Environment.NewLine;
                }
                Assert.Fail(output);
            }
        }



        private string GetSolutionFile(string SolutionFileName)
        {
            var currentDirectory = new DirectoryInfo(System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(new System.Uri(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase).LocalPath));
            while (!currentDirectory.GetFiles("*", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly).Any(x => x.Name == SolutionFileName))
            {
                currentDirectory = currentDirectory.Parent;
            }
            return currentDirectory.FullName + "\\" + SolutionFileName;
        }

        public List<string> GetAllProjects(string solutionFile)
        {
            var content = File.ReadAllText(solutionFile);
            Regex projReg = new Regex("Project\\(\"\\{[\\w-]*\\}\"\\) = \"([\\w _]*.*)\", \"(.*\\.(cs|vcx|vb)proj)\"", RegexOptions.Compiled);
            var matches = projReg.Matches(content).Cast<Match>();
            List<string> projects = matches.Select(x => x.Groups[2].Value).ToList();
            for (int i = 0; i < projects.Count; ++i)
            {
                if (!Path.IsPathRooted(projects[i]))
                {
                    projects[i] = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(solutionFile), projects[i]);
                }
                projects[i] = Path.GetFullPath(projects[i]);
            }
            return projects;
        }
    }

That's a nice solution!
What you can do more is to try to report custom build status from the test itself, so that you can see that some files are missing directly from overview page

Hi Manuel,

I'm not familiar with asp.net mvc, but for one of our .csproj files I made a modification described here. This makes MSBuild fail if it cannot find one or more of the Content entries, so, consequently, TC will fail the build. In our case, the content was .sql files. Perhaps you can use a similar approach in your projects for other file types.

Regards,
Oleg.