Make Visual Studio auto reload solution when project files change

Question

On the current project I am working on, there is, at the moment, a large churn of code, which means updating from source control can mean at times many csproj file changes. As we all know, VS2010 doesn't have a "Reload all" button, but you must reload each project and confirm each reload.

Is there a method where either the project is auto-reloaded or the IDE can detect this and ask for a solution reload?

Answer 1

Finally found a solution:

http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/01/27/reloading-all-projects-with-vscommands/

Quoting from the site:

Quite often I’ll find myself working in situations where multiple projects have changed, and Visual Studio asks to reload them, one at a time. This happens when I’m working a lot with source control, and doing things like switching branches, performing merges, or just integrating upstream changes. I have to click “Reload” a million times for each project that changed on disk, and it’s quite annoying. On top of that, VS forgets which files I have open, so every file that I was working on gets closed.

I may be the last VS user to find out about this, but a free lite version of the VSCommands plugin is available on the Visual Studio Gallery that does just what I need – reload all changed projects at once, preserving which files I had open:

Answer 2

It's a pain, but the best option I've found is to Close the solution before Getting the latest source code.

If there are more than two changed projects, it is faster to manually unload&reload the entire solution than it is to Get and wait for it to unload&reload the affected projects only - reloading projects is achingly slow (even disregarding having to click the OK button for every project that changed).

(In my mind the real question is: Why does it ask that question at all??? If you Get the latest source code, there is absolutely no sane reason why you would want to only use part of it. It's like a petrol station attendant saying "You've bought some fuel. Would you like me to now actually put it in your car, or shall I just pour it out on the ground?")