Question

I would like to open into memory an existing .sln file.

Example of a non-working method:

private Solution2 OpenSolution(string filePath)
{
    Solution2 sln;
    sln.Open(filePath);
    return sln;
}

If I have an instance of Solution2 then i can call the method Open; but how can i get an instance of Solution2?

My goal is then to get the adequate project and read some of its settings… but that’s easy having access to the solution.

Answer 1

You can programmatically create a hidden instance of Visual Studio, and then use it to manipulate your solution. This example will list out all the projects that live in the given solution.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using EnvDTE;
using EnvDTE80;

namespace so_sln
{
   class Program
   {
      [STAThread]
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         System.Type t = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID("VisualStudio.DTE.8.0", true);
         DTE2 dte = (EnvDTE80.DTE2)System.Activator.CreateInstance(t, true);

         // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228772.aspx for the
         // code for MessageFilter - just paste it into the so_sln namespace.
         MessageFilter.Register();

         dte.Solution.Open(@"C:\path\to\my.sln");
         foreach (Project project in dte.Solution.Projects)
         {
            Console.WriteLine(project.Name);
         }

         dte.Quit();
      }
   }

   public class MessageFilter : IOleMessageFilter
   {
      ... Continues at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228772.aspx

(The nonsense with STAThread and MessageFilter is “due to threading contention issues between external multi-threaded applications and Visual Studio”, whatever that means. Pasting in the code from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228772.aspx makes it work.)