Visual Studio 2005, how to get where project are used in a solution?

Question

I have a solution with other 70 projects into it. My question is : How can I know where the project is used? I do not want to open all those 70 projects to verify the References one by one. How can I see which project use one project in particular?

Edit I do not want to do 1 by 1 search in XML or in the Reference in VS. I would like a quick way to do it.

Answer 1

Visual Ndepend is a tool that I am trying at this moment and look promising with my original question.

Answer 2

There's a pretty cool codeplex project that creates dependecy visualizations that I've used before. Although, with 70 projects, you probably won't be able to read it very well unless you only have a few dependencies per project.

Anyway, it's still worth checking out-- you could probably even repurpose some of the source code to just output the depenecies to a list.

It at Dependecy Visualizer Codeplex Project

Answer 3

You could resort to using the Search feature in Windows itself.

Each of the projects has a file called library_name.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt.

A quick windows search for the DLL I was looking for with *FileListAbsolute.txt as the filter yielded the results I wanted.

The FileListAbsolute.txt files list the DLLs and such for the particular projects. I did this for VS 2008, but I would guess it might be available for VS 2005 too.

Answer 4

The project files are in XML, so writing something to parse them should be no big deal. If you just want to find which projects reference particular other projects, "grep" would probably work well enough.

Answer 5

You could even use the search feature of Studio itself, if you are looking for a particular project. Search just the xml project files for that particular project. If you're trying to map out everything, this wouldn't work so well.