Wildcard for content in an XNA content project? - visual-studio

Question

I have an XNA 3.1 content project (.contentproj) with the following:
<ItemGroup>
<Compile Include="tiles\B000N800.BMP">
<Name>B000N800</Name>
<Importer>TextureImporter</Importer>
<Processor>TextureProcessor</Processor>
</Compile>
<Compile Include="tiles\B000N801.BMP">
<Name>B000N801</Name>
<Importer>TextureImporter</Importer>
<Processor>TextureProcessor</Processor>
</Compile>
(... and so on ...)
</ItemGroup>
What I'd like to do is be able to specify a wildcard so that tiles\*.bmp gets compiled instead - so that I don't have to keep re-synchronising the content project when I add and remove textures from the "tiles" directory.
Does anyone know a way to do this?
Ideally the solution would ignore the hidden ".svn" directory, under "tiles". And also the content project would continue to work in Visual Studio.

Answer 1

You'll have to use wildcard in your item definition :
<ItemGroup>
<Compile Include="tiles\**\*.BMP"
Exclude="tiles\.svn\*">
<Name>%(Compile.Filename)</Name>
<Importer>TextureImporter</Importer>
<Processor>TextureProcessor</Processor>
</Compile>
</ItemGroup>

Answer 2

I found a blog post by Shawn Hargreaves that describes how to do this for XNA 1.0:
Wildcard content using MSBuild
Based on that, here is what I did which works with XNA 3.1 (and doesn't cause those weird _0 to appear):
Create a separate "tiles.proj" file with the following content:
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="3.5">
<ItemGroup>
<WildcardContent Include="tiles\**\*.BMP" Exclude="tiles\.svn\*">
<Importer>TextureImporter</Importer>
<Processor>TextureProcessor</Processor>
</WildcardContent>
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
<CreateItem Include="#(WildcardContent)" AdditionalMetadata="Name=%(FileName)">
<Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="Compile" />
</CreateItem>
</Target>
</Project>
And in the original ".contentproj" file, right before </Project>, add:
<Import Project="tiles.proj" />