Loaded Projects–A Visual Studio extension

I’ve just published Loaded Projects to the Visual Studio Gallery.

The inspiration for this extension was having to deal with solutions that contained a lot of projects (from 50 to 150 and beyond). Often you know that many of the projects aren’t relevant to the particular feature or bug that you’re working on and unloading those projects can give you a big performance win. Visual Studio will be more responsive and the time to build and debug will be shortened.

The problem comes when you need to move to a different area of the solution. You now need to reload some of the previously unloaded projects, but also unload some others that are now no longer significant. Wouldn’t it be great if you could save a record of all the unloaded projects so that you could reuse it again later?

Enter Loaded Projects!

Click on the ‘Loaded Projects’ item in the context menu after right-clicking on a solution.

A dialog window appears, from which you can save the current set of loaded/unloaded projects as a new profile,

select an existing profile and load that, or choose to delete a profile you no longer need.

If you like the extension, please write up a review on the gallery page.

I’ve put the source code up on GitHub, so make use of the Issues page to submit any bugs or feature requests, and of course pull requests are always welcome.

The extension initially just supports Visual Studio 2012. If there is enough interest then it should be pretty straight-forward to back-port it to to 2010 too.