Taking the Pain out of Proj Editing

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.

Edu Muñoz had a problem. While in Visual Studio, he kept finding the need to edit his CSProj files. You all know that drill, and how if can be a little bit of a pain. Edu said enough, and being a Dev, developed a quicker and easier solution. And best of all, he shared it with all of us!

EditProj: Visual Studio extension to edit project files

What’s this?
Have you ever modified a Visual Studio project file (e.g., *.csproj) by hand? If you want to do this in Visual Studio, you first have to select ‘Unload Project’, followed by ‘Edit $projectFile’ and finally ‘Reload Project’. The alternative I used is to open the project file in an external editor and, when saved, Visual Studio will prompt to reload the project automatically.
The second method proves Visual Studio will not crash if the project file is modified without it knowing it, or in other words, there is no need to unload the project first.
I’ve had to do this maneuver quite often at work, more often than I would have liked. Last weekend I made an extension for Visual Studio to allow to do exactly what I wanted: skip the unloading and reloading clicks, with the direct option to ‘Edit Project File’.
It’s called EditProj. Feedback is welcome.
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