> The messiness came with solution files (since VS uses solution files and project files).
Indeed. Solution files are not only a terrible to work with in general, they are also unmergeable. They are the number one source of broken builds where I work whenever we do branching and merging. Everyone hates them.
Right now we have a two-layer hierarchy: Solutions, which contains projects (which are perfectly mergeable), and projects which contains code. Projects can depend on other projects, and must therefore also be present in the solution.
You thus need to redundantly express dependencies across solutions (which cannot safely be merged), and besides the academical (violating the DRY principle) this causes real world problems.
What would be neat was if we did away with solutions completely and instead you could have projects depend on other projects directly. And that was it.
Then you could create "solution-projects" by adding the actual project you wanted built, which which again might have their own dependencies and everything would resolve itself just nicely.
I'm pretty sure Eclipse already does this, so what's holding Microsoft back?
Indeed. Solution files are not only a terrible to work with in general, they are also unmergeable. They are the number one source of broken builds where I work whenever we do branching and merging. Everyone hates them.
Right now we have a two-layer hierarchy: Solutions, which contains projects (which are perfectly mergeable), and projects which contains code. Projects can depend on other projects, and must therefore also be present in the solution.
You thus need to redundantly express dependencies across solutions (which cannot safely be merged), and besides the academical (violating the DRY principle) this causes real world problems.
What would be neat was if we did away with solutions completely and instead you could have projects depend on other projects directly. And that was it.
Then you could create "solution-projects" by adding the actual project you wanted built, which which again might have their own dependencies and everything would resolve itself just nicely.
I'm pretty sure Eclipse already does this, so what's holding Microsoft back?