Visual Studio 2015 takes a long time (10 - 15 minutes) to reload projects after a "Get Latest" from TFS

Question

My question is very similar (but not identical to) this one. There's also a discussion of a similar issue on a MSDN blog. However, the answers given in those posts didn't really resolve the issue for me.

I have a large solution file (currently 106 projects, which I've always considered less than ideal, but I didn't have a say in that).

When I do a "Get Latest" from Visual Studio involving a large number of changes, Visual Studio spends literally 10 - 15 minutes reloading projects (not an exaggeration in the least, it really is that slow to reload). This doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with small number of changes; I haven't quite figured out the patten behind when Visual Studio does a "full" reload and when it just reloads a few projects (or none at all).

If I do the "Get Latest" when the solution file is closed the "Get Latest" happens very quickly. (I've been using that as a workaround some of the time, but sometimes I forget, and it's a decidely inconvenient workaround). It also doesn't take an undue amount of time to load the solution in the first place (probably under 30 seconds in most cases), which leads me to my first question: why would it take so much longer (factor of 20x longer or more) for Visual Studio to unload and reload the projects than it would to close and re-open the solution? It's a bit of a long-shot, but is there a way to force Visual Studio to behave in this way (i.e. have it just completely close and re-open the solution instead of unloading and re-loading the individual projects)?

I do see that there was a bug report for a similar issue in an older version of Visual Studio. However, bafflingly enough, Microsoft closed it as "not reproducible." I guess there have been other bug reports about this issue as well, but there's no evidence that Microsoft intends to fix this issue (or even acknowledge its existence) at this point.

Can anyone suggest a better solution or workaround for this?

I am using Visual Studio Professional 2015 by the way.

Answer 1

To reiterate what was said in the comments as an answer, it would appear that this is a bug in Visual Studio and that the best workaround right now is still simply closing the solution before doing a "Get Latest" and re-opening it after TFS is done.

I created a bug report here if anyone is interested.

Update: Microsoft has this in their backlog currently and plans it for a future release. (They're not that specific about how future of a release they're planning it for).