Is there anyway to tell Visual Studio not to open all the documents when I load solution?

Question

When you open a solution in Visual Studio 2008 (or ealier versions for that matter), it opens all the documents that you did not close before you closed Visual Studio. Is there anyway to turn this functionality off, or a plugin that fixes this behavior? It takes forever to load a solution with 50 files open?

Answer 1

Have you tried deleting the .suo file?

It's a hidden file that lives beside your solution (sln) file. suo is "solution user options", and contains your last configuration, such as what tabs you left open the last time you worked on the project, so they open again when you reload the project in Visual Studio.

If you delete it, a new 'blank' suo file will be recreated silently.

Answer 2

You can automate the process of closing all the files prior to closing a solution by adding a handler for the BeforeClosing event of EnvDTE.SolutionEvents -- this will get invoked when VS is exiting.

In VS2005, adding the following to the EnvironmentEvents macro module will close all open documents:

     Private Sub SolutionEvents_BeforeClosing() Handles SolutionEvents.BeforeClosing         DTE.ExecuteCommand("Window.CloseAllDocuments")     End Sub 

Visual Studio 2008 appears to support the same events so I'm sure this would work there too.

I'm sure you could also delete the .suo file for your project in the handler if you wanted, but you'd probably want the AfterClosing event.

Answer 3

From Visual Studio 2017 Update 8 there is an option in projects and solutions which you can use to enable this: