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Best practices for large solutions in Visual Studio (2008)

Asked 2009-03-27T14:40:54.373
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We have a solution with around 100+ projects, most of them C#. Naturally, it takes a long time to both open and build, so I am looking for best practices for such beasts. Along the lines of questions I am hoping to get answers to, are:

  • how do you best handle references between projects
    • should "copy local" be on or off?

  • should every project build to its own folder, or should they all build to the same output folder(they are all part of the same application)

  • Are solutions' folders a good way of organizing stuff?

I know that splitting the solution up into multiple smaller solutions is an option, but that comes with its own set of refactoring and building headaches, so perhaps we can save that for a separate thread :-)

c# visual-studio-2008 msbuild projects-and-solutions
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We have about 60+ projects and we don't use solution files. We have a mix of C# and VB.Net projects. The performance was always an issue. We don't work on all the projects at the same time. Each developer creates their own solution files based on the projects they're working on. The solution files doesn't get checked into our source control.

All Class library projects would build to a CommonBin folder at the root of the source directory. Executable / Web Projects build to their individual folder.

We don't use project references, instead file based reference from the CommonBin folder. I wrote a custom MSBuild Task that would inspect the projects and determine the build order.

We have been using this for few years now and have no complaints.

answered 2009-06-05T17:52:42.443

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