Visual Studio 2019 (v16.9.4) becomes unresponsive when marking MVC views as content when the Views directory contains a large number of files

[czemacleod]

Visual Studio 2019 (v16.9.4) becomes unresponsive when marking MVC views as content when the Views directory contains a large number of files

[bachratyg]

You should try using globs directly instead of @(Items) when moving items from None to Content and refrain from using Remove whenever possible. That tends to be much faster at the cost of your project being a bit more verbose.

There is an issue with VS because internally globs are turned into regexes and that prevents short-circuiting of directory traversals (e.g. Views\** glob is matched against all files in node_modules\** even though the prefix is guaranteed to fail). AFAIK this will ship in VS 16.10. See dotnet/msbuild#2000

You can also try setting EnableDefaultNoneItems to false, then you can simplify your project to this:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <EnableDefaultNoneItems>false</EnableDefaultNoneItems>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Include="App_Code\**;Content\**;Scripts\**;_app_offline.htm;appsettings.json;engineConfiguration.config;Global.asax;NLog.config;robots.txt" />
    <Content Include="Views\**" />
  </ItemGroup>

This has the side effect that by default no items will be added as None and you have to add them manually.

Note that this sdk is still very much a work in progress and may not support all features that the first-party sdks do (e.g. DefaultItemExcludes is not honored in some cases).

[stevenvolckaert]

Thank you so much for your suggestions @bachratyg! I'll try them out and report back here.

[stevenvolckaert]

I got this working several weeks ago, and none of my team members reported issues. Thank you @bachratyg for your help!