Creating a Clean Task for .Net Core Projects in VS Code

When you create or open a .Net Core project in VS Code, it gives you the option to create the necessary files for building the project.

One of the files created in this process is tasks.json. What tasks.json defines is a series of named tasks that perform a series of actions on the project (e.g. build, publish, etc…).

One task that isn’t defined by default is a clean task. A clean task is often useful if your project is not building for strange and/or unknown reasons - sometimes these issues can be caused by the intermediate build files that are not recreated from repeated builds. A clean task will remove these files, which will get recreated during the next build.

To add a clean task, add the following JSON snippet to the tasks array in your tasks.json:

{
    "label": "clean",
    "command": "dotnet",
    "type": "process",
    "args": [
        "clean",
        "/consoleloggerparameters:NoSummary"
    ],
    "problemMatcher": "$msCompile"
},

This tasks runs dotnet clean to clean build output of all projects/a solution.

You can then run this task in one of two ways:

1. From the Run menu select Run Task and select clean from the list.
2. Hit Ctrl+Shift+p to open the Command Palette and enter tasks. Then select Tasks: Run Task and select clean from the list.

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• Build Configuration