Easy way to add multiple existing .csproj to a Visual Studio Solution?

Question

I've checked out a branch of C# code from source control. It contains maybe 50 projects in various folders. There's no existing .sln file to be found.

I intended to create a blank solution to add existing solutions. The UI only lets me do this one project at a time.

Is there something I'm missing? I'd like to specify a list of *.csproj files and somehow come up with a .sln file that contains all the projects.

Answer 1

There's no way to do this out of the box, but you could create a macro to do it.

Answer 2

You might be able to write a little PowerShell script or .NET app that parses all the projects' .csproj XML and extracts their details (ProjectGuid etc.) then adds them into the .sln file. It'd be quicker and less risky to add them all by hand, but an interesting challenge nonetheless.

Answer 3

Depends on visual studio version.
But the name of this process is "Automation and Extensibility for Visual Studio"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t51cz75w.aspx

Answer 4

if you open the sln file with notepad you can see the format of the file which is easy to understand but for more info take a look @ Hack the Project and Solution Files .understanding the structure of the solution files you can write an application which will open all project files and write the application name ,address and GUID to the sln file .

of course I think if it's just once you better do it manually

Answer 5

Note: This is only for Visual Studio 2010

Found here is a cool add in for Visual Studio 2010 that gives you a PowerShell console in VS to let you interact with the IDE. Among many other things you can do using the built in VS extensibility as mentioned by @Avram, it would be pretty easy to add files or projects to a solution.

Answer 6

A PowerShell implementation that recursively scans the script directory for .csproj files and adds them to a (generated) All.sln:

$scriptDirectory = (Get-Item $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path).Directory.FullName
$dteObj = [System.Activator]::CreateInstance([System.Type]::GetTypeFromProgId("VisualStudio.DTE"))

$slnDir = ".\"
$slnName = "All"

$dteObj.Solution.Create($scriptDirectory, $slnName)
(ls . -Recurse *.csproj) | % { $dteObj.Solution.AddFromFile($_.FullName, $false) }

$dteObj.Solution.SaveAs( (Join-Path $scriptDirectory 'All.sln') ) 

$dteObj.Quit()