Is there such a thing as a “content/data only project” in visual studio

Question

I have a bunch of ancillary XML and XSLT files that I want to edit and manage in visual studio.

The files do not logically belong under any code project in my solution

Answer 1

Andy posted a link with a solution that's mostly worked for me; basically delete the following line from the project file:

and add the following lines:

I also found that disabling the project Debug property "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" (for each configuration) prevented the MyProject.vshost.exe file from being generated.

As David I. McIntosh pointed out in a comment on this answer, if your project is part of a solution with multiple projects and any other projects use the same output path as the content-only project, the above Clean target will delete all of the files in the output path, i.e. the build output of other projects, and would thus only be correct if the content-only project is the first project built (among those sharing the same build output path). The following is a safer and friendlier Clean target for this scenario: