Control selective sync programmatically

Dropbox absolutely needs a better feature request system than "Post on a forum somewhere and we'll pass it on, we pinky swear".

You can ignore files and folders:

https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/ignored-files

hodaszayeah, that's not what we want, we want control of the selective sync feature. Ignored files are never synced to dropbox.

You are right, I'm sorry!
I found this forum because of b9chris's post about VS dev problems and didn't read the original question.
Ignoring bin, obj, etc... folders is a solution for b9chris's problem - it helped me for sure.

That worked!

I can't stand Powershell so here's some quick C# code that generates Powershell Dropbox ignore commands for every bin or obj folder in a root folder (since Visual Studio has a habit of throwing a ton of these all over a Solution/Project, and retyping all those paths is annoying).

public void MakePaths()

{

string rootPath = @"C:\Users\Chris\Dropbox\Code\2017\BrassNine";

var sb = new StringBuilder();

foreach(var path in problemFolders(rootPath))

{

sb.AppendLine($"Set-Content -Path '{path}' -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1");

}

string script = sb.ToString();

}

protected IEnumerable<string> problemFolders(string rootPath)
{

var dir = new DirectoryInfo(rootPath);

foreach (var badDir in dir.EnumerateDirectories("bin", SearchOption.AllDirectories))

yield return badDir.FullName;

foreach (var badDir in dir.EnumerateDirectories("obj", SearchOption.AllDirectories))

yield return badDir.FullName;

}

The script variable will be the Powershell lines to copy/paste into a Powershell window or .ps1 script.

I'm dumping mine into a root-level file named DropboxIgnores.ps1 so I can run it each time I restore to a new machine, since I don't think these ignores sync.