How do I merge two different Visual Studio solutions?

Question

I have two Visual Studio 2005 solutions, one of which builds a binary and all of its dependencies, and one of which builds a web app and some utilities and an installer for them. Up until now, we've had the aforementioned binary just included in the installer as a static file; I want to take all of the projects from that binary's solution and have them be part of the installer solution, for a single once-through build of everything.

As far as I can tell, I can't add the existing projects from the binary's solution without losing the dependency information. This will work, but since there are 20 some projects involved, I want to preserve dependency information when moving the projects in. It's looking like I may just have to do this in a text editor with the solution XML... is there a better way?

Note that this is NOT the same as the related questions about merging two versions of the same solution file.

Answer 1

You might want to consider using references instead of the dependencies. Those are stored in project's file and consequently are preserved across solutions. There might be something which can be done with Dependencies and not with References, however I am not aware of any such situation and for simple uses references are more than enough.

Answer 2

Try selecting all of the project nodes in the tree then drag & drop them into the other solution.

Answer 3

If I had to do this, I would just manually edit the solution XML. Its not terribly complicated. Plus it sounds like this is a 1-time effort, so you don't need anything repeatable.

Answer 4

There's a way to do this built in to Visual Studio. Right click the solution, and select Add - Existing Project. Select the other solution from there.