How can I force Visual Studio 2010 to reload files and projects that have changed on disk?

Question

I often use command line tools to do source control updates of files and projects that I have loaded into Visual Studio 2010. With previous releases when I did this I could force Visual Studio to notice and load the changes by doing a Save All. This doesn't seem to work in Visual Studio 2010.

I do have 'Detect when a file is changed outside the environment' checked in the Options window, but if I sit and wait it takes minutes or longer for the changes to be noticed.

How can I force 2010 to notice the changes in loaded source files and projects?

Answer 1

It sounds like this could be the same problem that I experienced here. VS 2010 doesn't seem to pick up on file changes made outside the IDE (like if you add a file to the file system, and then click refresh in Visual Studio you don't see the new file, I experienced this on C++ projects).

You can refer here for the MS case, they claim they have fixed the problem in "the next VS release", which I assume would mean the first service pack for VS 2010.

Answer 2

You can reforce reloading a project by unloading and loading the project.

Right-click the project and select Unload Project, then, when the project is unloaded right-click again and select Reload Project.

Note that this requires that all modified files in the project either be saved or the changes in the file be discarded.