Preventing referenced assembly PDB and XML files copied to output

I wanted to be able to add and remove referenced assemblies in my primary application while avoiding the the need to maintain which files I needed to delete or exclude.

I dug through Microsoft.Common.targets looking for something that would work and found the AllowedReferenceRelatedFileExtensions property. It defaults to .pdb; .xml so I explicitly defined it in my project file. The catch is that you need something (whitespace is not sufficient) otherwise it will still use the default.

<Project ...>
  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
    ...
    <AllowedReferenceRelatedFileExtensions>
      <!-- Prevent default XML and PDB files copied to output in RELEASE. 
           Only *.allowedextension files will be included, which doesn't exist in my case.
       -->
      .allowedextension
    </AllowedReferenceRelatedFileExtensions> 
  </PropertyGroup>

You can also specify this via the command line:

MsBuild.exe build.file /p:AllowedReferenceRelatedFileExtensions=none