Redhead - Jacob Slusser’s Blog

A buddy of mine had a great suggestion on how to work with large Visual Studio solutions. At my work it’s not uncommon for us to have Visual Studio solutions with as many as 45, 65, or even 75 projects. This year we hope to better isolate some of the various system and get back to file references, however, until then I find that working with solutions that large can slow down Visual Studio and consequently slow me down.

Using Davy’s suggestion, I created a new solution with the single project that I work with 85% of the time. I can open the solution and compile in just seconds now instead of minutes.

Tips Visual Studio

After a couple tries I was able to use the .NET Mass Downloader to get all the .NET reference source code at one time. Before that, if I wanted to look at some source I would have to setup a test project that calls the code I’m interested in so that I could debug into it. Now I can just search all the files at once for what I’m looking for.

As an added bonus I was able to follow the instructions to get symbols setup on Visual Studio 2005 (which I still use at work). Besides the downloader, I don’t know of any other way of doing that.

Tools .NET, Visual Studio