Keeping Visual Studio project files in sync with directory contents?

We have a large C project with development happening on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Most of our Windows developers use MSVC -- for example, the free edition of Visual C. Oftentimes .c source files are added, renamed or deleted, and we find it very frustrating to keep the Visual C project in sync with these changes to directories.

Developer A might add newfile.c, check it in to Subversion and happily continue work.

Developers B, C, etc. update to the latest revision. Then when they compile in MSVC they get an e开发者_C百科rror (buried somewhere in the huge compile output) saying the linker can't find such-and-such symbol. They then need to look to see what files have changed and manually add that to the project tree in MSVC.

(Developer A might be on Unix where build scripts tend to automatically find the right files to compile, and not realise how much work they've just created for B and C!)

My question is, is there a way to tell MSVC to consider every .c file in a directory as part of the project?

Update We have build scripts that can create initial MSVC project files. But there's a signicifant amount of customisation that gets done after this (pointing to libraries, etc.) which would be blown away each time the scripts were rerun merely to add a new file.

Given how many large projects there are out there, I'm kind of surprised Visual Studio requires such manual work by each developer just to pick up new files added by others. I'm going to optimistically hold out for a better solution for now...

I don't think Visual Studio can do what you want (but would be glad if I'm proved wrong!).

What works for me is to use cross platform project files. Take a look at CMake, which allows you to define the structure of your project in a platform independent text based format. Then on each platform these project files are processed with a tool that then automatically generates the appropriate thing, which could be Makefiles, Visual Studio solution and project files, etc.

If this is really a serious problem, I would recommend writing a script which updates VS project file accordingly with directory contents.