I’ve got a pet peeve about the way build trees are organized: I like to segregate source files from build files. For example, the ideal tree would have a src directory that had all the source, an obj directory that had all the intermediate built files (for example, .obj files), and a bin directory that had all the finished built files (.exe, .dll, .pdb, .map, and so on). I think there are a number of benefits to this organization:

• If I want to clean out the built stuff, I just delete the bin and obj directories. Simple.
• If a build fails, I can compare the bin and/or obj directories to a previous successful build to get an overview of what finished and what didn’t. Simple.
• If I want to make a copy of just the human-produced files, I know where they are (src). If I want to save off the finished executables, I know where they are (bin). Simple.

It can be kind of a pain organizing things in this way, but I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Usually, it’s only a matter of setting up a project properly at the start, there’s no maintenance required.

Unfortunately, Visual Studio .NET doesn’t let me organize things this way for C# projects. There’s an option for where to put the bin stuff, but the .obj files have to go into a subdirectory of the project directory. Why? Grrrr, submit to the borg!