How to configure my solution to show all projects collapsed on Visual Studio?

Question

Every time I check out my solution from the SCM I have to collapse manually each project in my solution to get a good overview of it.

I know that the collapsed settings are stored in a .suo file, which is binary. I don't want to commit this file to the SCM, instead I am looking for a xml tag that I could put in the .sln file so when I open it all projects are collapsed.

How to do that?

Answer 1

The smallest plugin that helped me is Collapse Selection In Solution Explorer

Answer 2

Install DPack for Visual Studio and use the "collapse all projects" context menu item ;-)

Answer 3

Install Productivity Power Tools and use Solution Navigator instead of Solution Explorer:

Solution Navigator is a new tool window that acts like an enhanced Solution Explorer. With it, you can:

* Expand code files to navigate to its classes, expand classes to navigate to their members, and so on (C# and VB only)
* Search your solution, all the way down to class members
* Filter your solution or projects to see just opened files, unsaved files, and so on
* View related information about classes and members (such as references or callers/callees for C#)
* Preview images by hovering over them, or preview rich information by hovering over code items
* We've also added support for multiple selection and drag & drop. (New!) 

It also haves a collapse all button.