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

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.

Answer 2

If you want to automate the process you can try playing around with this tool

http://code.google.com/p/merge-solutions/