Add Existing Projects

Source and Support

Source | Issues

Background

My solutions used have lots of references to other projects as I would load common code as source code libraries. When creating a new solution (or retro-fitting an existing solution to use new libraries), I would end up using File | Add | Existing project a lot. As I was curious about how extensions in Visual Studio worked, I decided to write a very simple one to ease the grunt work of adding multiple common projects.

This simple extension, originally created for Visual Studio 2012 as I recall, is the result. I'm afraid it doesn't use WPF, so it's a touch ugly but it gets the job done.

Note that in the intervening years I finally converted almost 100 common library projects into proper NuGet packages and so I haven't actually needed this extension for some time. As some people find it useful I tend to create a new version for each new version of Visual Studio but that's about it at the moment - the extension isn't really actively developed.

Using the extension

To use the extension, open the Tools menu and choose Add Projects. This will open a lovely unthemed Windows Forms dialogue containing a list of projects that can be automatically added.

Projects are colour coded as follows

• Black - no particular status
• Grey - the project is already part of the active solution
• Red - the source project cannot be found

Note that the first time you open this dialogue, the list will be empty - the MRU must be populated by yourself.

Check each project you want to add to your solution, then click the OK button. It will then try and add each selected project to your solution, skipping any that are already present.

You can limit the projects displayed in the list by entering text into the Filter field. This filter text can be a regular expression and is matched on the entire filename, including the path.

Configuring settings

The settings dialog allows you to configure folder exclusions used by the Find Projects dialogue (for example you probably don't want to scan node_modules) and the project types used by both the Find Projects dialog and the manual file browser dialogue.

To display the settings dialog, click Settings from the main window.

Configuring folder exclusions

Enter the names of any folders you want to exclude from automatic scanning, one per line. These matches are a simple text match on a full path, so use directory separators to avoid partial matches - e.g. \bin\ to ignore all folders named bin, but not folders that contain bin.

Configuring project types

Enter a simple description and file mask for each type, one type per line. Separate the description and mask with the pipe (|) character. Multiple masks can be used, separate each with a semi-colon (;).

See the Filter property documentation for the FileDialog class for more information on this method of specifying filter options.

Adding a single project to the MRU

To add a single project to the list, click the Add File button then select the project you want to include.

Note: Currently changes won't be saved unless you click OK from this dialogue, or click the Settings button and then click OK from the Settings dialogue.

Adding multiple projects to the MRU

To add multiple projects to the list, click the Add Folder button, then select a folder. The folder (and its sub folders) will then be scanned for any projects not already in the main MRU. Tick the projects you want to add, then click OK to update the main list.

Removing projects from the MRU

To remove projects from the MRU, select one or more projects, click the Remove button and then confirm the removal.

Note: Currently changes won't be saved unless you click OK from this dialogue, or click the Settings button and then click OK from the Settings dialogue.

Configuration Settings

The settings for the extension are saved into an XML file located at %AppData%\Cyotek\VisualStudioExtensions\AddProjects\config.xml.

<!--?xml version="1.0"?-->
<ExtensionSettings xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <ExcludedFolders>
    <string>\bower_components\</string>
    <string>\node_modules\</string>
    <string>\bin\</string>
    <string>\obj\</string>
  </ExcludedFolders>
  <ProjectTypes>
    <string>C# Projects|*.csproj</string>
    <string>Visual Basic Projects|*.vbproj</string>
    <string>C++ Projects|*.vcproj;*.vcxproj</string>
    <string>F# Projects|*.fsproj</string>
    <string>NuGet Packager Projects|*.nuproj</string>
  </ProjectTypes>
  <Projects>
    <string>C:\Checkout\cyotek\source\Libraries\Cyotek.ApplicationServices\Cyotek.ApplicationServices.csproj</string>
    <string>C:\Checkout\cyotek\source\Libraries\Cyotek.ApplicationServices.Commands\Cyotek.ApplicationServices.Commands.csproj</string>
    <!-- SNIP -->
    <string>C:\Checkout\cyotek\source\Libraries\Cyotek.Windows.Runtime.Support\Cyotek.Windows.Runtime.Support.csproj</string>
    <string>C:\Checkout\cyotek\source\Libraries\Cyotek.Windows.Runtime.Testing\Cyotek.Windows.Runtime.Testing.csproj</string>
  </Projects>
</ExtensionSettings> 

The Projects element stores the MRU list of projects.

The ExcludedFolders element stores a list of folder names to ignore when automatically scanning a folder tree, for example node_modules.

The ProjectTypes element stores a set of filters that are used by file and folder dialogues.

Known Issues

These are the issues I currently know about - please let me know if you find anything else.

• The extension is using Windows Forms instead of WPF, so it won't theme with VS
• There's little error handling and it's not hooked up with the normal automatic error submission library I use. So if it crashes, it won't tell me automatically (so please raise an issue if it does!)
• As I already mentioned, if you make changes to the core project list, it will only save it you select something to add to your solution.
• It doesn't honour the current selection in the Project Explorer. For example, if you create and select a Solution Folder, using File | Add | Existing Project will add the project as a child. This extension won't, as by the time I'd finished writing it I could have filled several swear jars
• The source code is awful, but it does work
• It was written for an older version of Visual Studio. While it was updated slightly to support the new async model in 2019, I have no idea if it follows best practices for extensions
• It can be a bit slow when adding lots of projects. I never did get around to seeing if it was possible to batch add projects to Visual Studio... it is still far quicker than doing it by hand

More information can be found on the Cyotek Blog.

Change Log

Please view the change log for this extension on the GitHub page for this project.