Why some files don't get pushed to TFS drop location.

Yesterday I got a question about why *.dat files were not being added to the ./Binaries folder during a Team Build, and thus not pushed to the TFS drop location. The *.dat files are used by a third party software we use to track browser requests.

After digging around a bit, we found that the *.dat files were added to the .NET 3.5 C# web project with the element <None. Other files part of this third party were added as <Content.

...
<Content Include="Views\Browse\ItemControl.ascx" />
<None Include="bin\bhawk_sp.dat" />
...

A very intellectual developer in our group (not me) found out that the *.dat files were added with "Build Action" defaulted to None. To change this, I believe he Right Clicked on the file > Properties > and changed the Build Action to Content.



Now the *.dat files get copied over to the ./Binaries directory and pushed to the Drop Location.