Visual Studio external tool output - now it's useful

Following on from yesterday's blogpost  about Visual Studio external tool output, I've written a tool that will be useful to me and hopefully others. A common directory structure when using binary dependencies in your VS projects is something like this

    Projects\Dependencies

    Projects\KenKen\SourceCode

    Projects\FizzBuzz\SourceCode

When I'm in a project that has references to libraries in the Dependencies folder, I occasionally need to check the version of the libraries I've referenced. My tool, FileVersion, takes two parameters, a start directory and a search directory, and walks up the start directory one level at a time until it finds the search directory. It then reports on the versions of the libraries (.dll and .exe) in that directory.


If the tool is called as an external tool in Visual Studio, it can be configured to search for the dependencies for the current project.

The output from running the tool looks like this in VS, saving you traversing the directory structure yourself and viewing each file's properties manually

The executable and source code are on GitHub