How to link multiple visual studio solutions toget

Question

I have 3 solutions and solution A requires built versions of the dlls from solution B and C in order to compile. it is not possible to merge it to one solution...

So far it seems that Visual Studio doesnt support solution references and msbuild is clever enough to know that you are building one solution from another etc if I try that way. The overall goal is to try to make the multiple solutions seem almost like there is only one - just solution A.

I believe this is a common problem, but how do you link it up nicely?

Answer 1

According to this answer, I would recommend you to create your own batch file which will build the relevant solutions for you.

That's very handy to use because the build process will output the build progression (Similar to Output window in Visual Studio) to the command promote for each and every build executes.

Furthermore, in a case that you need to build one solution before the other, you can write your own build order, for example:

1. build solution B
2. build solution C
3. build solution A (which internally uses "solution B" and "solution C" built files)

I've quickly written script to clarify the build order mentioned above and support most of modern Visual Studio versions.

Regards.

Answer 2

You can add a Makefile project to solution A which would build your solutions B and C (using msbuild for example) and make all the projects in A dependent on that Makefile project. This way you wouldn't be able to add project references to projects in B and C, but you can use dll references and they will always be built from latest sources.

Answer 3

You can try to automate the merge process to save some time: http://code.google.com/p/merge-solutions/

Although we had slightly different problem: about 15 solutions (~150 projects in total) that were using one common library. The problem was that if we tried to merge all of them into one in order to refactor / exterminate redundant code from common library. 1. merging 15 solutions involves a lot of clicking and waiting in VS 2. resulted solution was never up to date - nobody bothered updating it because of its size