I was getting tired of manually tracking all files in a folder and adding them to the *.csproj file in Visual Studio 2015, when I remembered my colleague Roger Vuistiner talking about using foo\** as an include pattern.

Rather than tracking all files found in some subfolder I want to include as content in my C# project, I just edited the *.csproj file manually and added this:

1    <Content Include="Content\electron\chrome-extensions\**\*">
2      <CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
3    </Content>

And from now one, whatever I drop on Content/electron/chrome-extensions will be picked up by Visual Studio. And this also works for nested subfolders.

Update (June 23, 2016)

I was not aware of the difference between foo\** and foo\**\*.

Both can be used in Visual Studio, with the same visual appearance in the Solution Explorer. However, only the latter (**\*) will really copy the content files when building.