At one point I was coding on a hobby project, using
Visual Studio Online for project management and source control. Because of the technologies involved, a large number of temporary files were being generated that I didn’t want checked in. Visual Studio’s TFS integration is pretty good at automatically filtering these kinds of files out and placing them in the Excluded Changes list in the Pending Changes window, but in my case the sheer number made it a pain to scan the Excluded Changes list for
valid changes that I actually wanted to commit.
In my case, I didn’t want those temporary files to show up at all – not even in the Excluded Changes list. In order to gain control over which files TFS should ignore completely, I added .tfignore files to my solution. These allow you to specify which files, extensions and directories to ignore (or un-ignore!) from source control. If you’re familiar with the concept of .gitignore files in GIT, you should feel right at home.
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I recently needed to verify the integrity of a large number of XML files that are stored in Azure Blob Storage. These files were essentially hand-written and contained numerous typos, errors and other inconsistencies. I needed to not only identify files that contained well-formed XML, but also find files containing nodes with names that were not on a list of known good names.
