VisualStudioSolutionShaker

Utility program to "Shake" Visual Studio Solutions (SLN) of "stale" Dependencies.

When To Use This Tool

This tool is a sister tool to GitHub aolszowka/VisualSudioSolutionUpdater. That tool is purely additive and makes no attempt to "shake" the dependency tree. Unfortunately you will soon find yourself in a situation where a dependency was added somewhere deep in the tree but then later removed. The Visual Studio Solution Updater (VSSU) will continue to happily add more Dependencies for this "dead" dependency.

In order to address the short comings of that tool this tool was written.

This tool is helpful in "shaking" or "pruning" references that are considered "stale" by its ruleset.

Operation

This tool will:

• (If Given a Single Solution) Perform the below operation for just this Solution
• (If Given a Directory) Will scan the given directory and all subdirectories for Visual Studio Solution files (*.sln) and perform the operation below.

For Each Solution File

• Load all Projects from the Solution File into a List. (AllExistingProjects)
• Load all projects from the Solution File EXCEPT those contained within the Virtual Solution Folder Dependencies into a List. (AllProjectsExceptDependencies)
• Crawl each project in AllProjectsExceptDependencies resolving its N-Order Microsoft Docs: Common MSBuild Project Items - ProjectReference into a List. (ResolvedProjectList)
• Delta ResolvedProjectList to AllExistingProjects to determine which projects can be "shaken".

Then depending on the operation chosen (validate or "Processing") one of two things will occur.

For validate output on the console will look similar to the following:

`90` Projects Can Be Removed From Solution `S:\BadSolution.sln`

The exit code will be the number of projects that will be removed from the solution files.

For Processing the output will generate the appropriate Microsoft Docs: dotnet sln commands to be ran to remove these "stale" references. The intent is to pipe this output into a batch file and then execute it. To change this behavior see Hacking: Modifying Solutions below.

dotnet sln "s:\BadSolution.sln" remove "s:\badproject.csproj"
REM `1` Projects Can Be Removed From Solution `s:\BadSolution.sln`

The exit code will be non-zero to indicate that projects would be removed from the solution files.

Usage

There are now two ways to run this tool:

1. (Compiled Executable) Invoke the tool via VisualStudioSolutionShaker and pass the arguments.
2. (Dotnet Tool) Install this tool using the following command dotnet tool install VisualStudioSolutionShaker (assuming that you have the nuget package in your feed) then invoke it via dotnet shake-solution

In both cases the flags to the tooling are identical:

Usage: C:\DirectoryWithSolutions\ [-validate][-ignore=ignore.txt]

Given either a Visual Studio Solution (*.sln) or a Directory to Scan; identify
any solution file that contains "extra" Projects. Extra Projects are defined as
projects that exist in a Virtual Solution Folder called "Dependencies" but are
not referenced by any project (via ProjectReference or RuntimeReference) outside
of the "Dependencies" folder.

If given a solution file or a directory find all solution files. Then opening
each solution, grab all projects contained within the solution, removing those
contained within the "Dependencies" Virtual Solution Folder. Then find all
N-Order ProjectReference projects for those that remain. Compare this list to
the existing list of projects in the Solution. Those projects that are missing
from this new list are then output as "dotnet sln remove" commands for further
processing to remove these projects. This is called "Process Mode".

When this project is ran with --validate  it performs the above operation as
described but instead the return code represents the number of projects that
would be removed from the given solution files.

When ran in "Process Mode" The output of this tool is expected to be piped to a
batch file that can be executed to perform the actual removes. This batch file
utilizes the "dotnet sln" tool to perform removals individually from each
solution file. Solution files which fail to load are printed as comments within
the batch file. The return code is non-zero if the resulting batch file would
result in modified Solution Files; otherwise, it is zero.

For the Validate Command special rules apply to projects which fail to load. If
you are validating a single Solution file and it fails to load you will have -1
returned. However if you validate an entire Directory these projects are
ignored. The return code is the number of projects that would be removed from
the solution files, or zero if no projects would be removed from solutions.

In all cases this tool DOES NOT modify the existing Solution files.

Arguments:

               <>            A Visual Studio Solution (*.sln) or Scan Directory
      --validate             Indicates if this tool should only be run in
                               validation mode
      --ignore=VALUE         Path to plain text file of regular expression
                               filters of solution files you DO NOT want this
                               tool to operate on
  -?, -h, --help             Show this message and exit

Hacking

Dependencies (Solution Folder)

Currently this tool only looks for projects to shake that are in the Dependencies folder. Most of this logic is stored in SolutionUtilities.GetProjectsFromSolutionExceptDependencies(string) more specifically the logic in SolutionUtilities.TryGetDepedenciesFolderGuid(SolutionFile, out string) should be investigated.

Modifying Solutions

Instead of attempting to reinvent the square wheel this tool instead provides output that is intended to be piped to a batch file which then invokes Microsoft Docs: dotnet sln at some point in the future it might be nice to have this more tightly integrated into the tool.

Contributing

Pull requests and bug reports are welcomed so long as they are MIT Licensed.

License

This tool is MIT Licensed.

Third Party Licenses

This project uses other open source contributions see LICENSES.md for a comprehensive listing.