efoleymsft/slngen

Visual Studio solution generator

SlnGen

Overview

SlnGen is a Visual Studio solution file generator. Visual Studio solutions generally do not scale well for large project trees. They are scoped views of a set of projects. Enterprise-level builds use custom logic like traversal to convey how they should be built by a hosted build environment. Maintaining Visual Studio solutions becomes hard because you have to keep them in sync with the other build logic. Instead, SlnGen reads the project references of a given project to create a Visual Studio solution on demand. For example, you can run it against a unit test project and be presented with a Visual Studio solution containing the unit test project and all of its project references. You can also run SlnGen against a traversal project in a rooted folder to open a Visual Studio solution containing that view of your project tree.

Getting Started

Install the package to an individual project (not recommended):

 Install-Package SlnGen

Or add it your Directory.Build.props:

<ItemGroup>
  <PackageReference Include="SlnGen" Version="2.0.0" />
</ItemGroup>

Generate and open a Visual Studio solution with MSBuild:

> MSBuild /Restore /t:SlnGen

You can also create a DOSKEY alias as a shortcut

> doskey slngen=msbuild /nologo /v:m /t:slngen

More documentation is available at jeffkl.github.io/SlnGen.