Stop Visual Studio asking for each project: has been modified outside the environment. Do you wish to reload?

Question

Do you wish to reload the project? Where's the Reload All option. Vote for this question and hopefully MS will implement a fix in VS2020.

With pleany of projects in a solution I for one dread doing an svn update.

This has been an issue from VS2003 but after a decade of clicking mindlessly on buttons it's getting on my wick.

Does anyone have a hack / registry entry / secret way of saying yes short of saying ignore (quick), closing and reloading the solution?

Answer 1

There are a couple of options you can tweak for this scenario. Both are under the Documents Options

• Tools -> Options
• Environment -> Documents

The first option is to just uncheck "Detect when files changed outside the environment". This will stop the reload dialog but will force you to manually reload.

The second option just below it is a bit better "Auto-load changes, if saved". This will just automatically load the changes without prompting you for every project.

Personally though I would go a slightly different route here. The problem is occuring because your managing your source code control outside of Visual Studio. If you switched to using an addin to manage within Visual Studio it would remove these problems altogether. For svn there are several free packages available including Ankhsvn which is fairly popular

Answer 2

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165643(VS.80).aspx

DetectFileChangesOutsideIDE

Get/Set (Boolean)

Determines whether the environment automatically reloads files opened in the IDE when the operating system notifies the IDE that the files have been modified on disk.

EDIT: Some clarification, as that page isn't immediately obvious.

Tools Menu->Options -> Environment->Documents->Uncheck Detect when file is changed outside the Environment