Sort Visual Studio 2008 Projects alphabetically inside Solution Folders

by Geert 9. January 2009 13:01

It is a known bug that Visual Studio does not sort projects alphabetically when the projects are located inside Solution Folders. Since I am working on pretty large solutions (more than 20 projects for 1 solution), and I like to order the projects via Solution Folders, this is a very irritating bug.

However, I accidently found the solution to this problem. Follow the steps below to sort your projects alphabetically inside Solution Folders.

  1. Right-click on a project and select rename (or simple select a project, wait 1 second, and click it again or press F2)
  2. Don’t change the name, simply select another project

Et voila, your projects are sorted like Visual Studio should do!

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This blog article shows how to sort Visual Studio 2008 projects alphabetically inside Solution Folders

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Comments (4) -

David Adsit
David Adsit United States
1/10/2009 6:11:36 AM #

Hey! Thanks! We have one solution with 65+ projects and folders seemed natural to help with organizing them.  This bug has been driving me nuts for the last month.  We have one guy on the team who was actually going to write a tool to parse the solution file and resort the projects directly.

Rohan Cragg
Rohan Cragg United Kingdom
2/5/2009 6:21:43 PM #

At last! Hooray! thanks for posting.

Jeff Doolittle
Jeff Doolittle United States
3/3/2009 6:35:22 PM #

Unfortunately, when I re-open the solution, the projects are out of order again.  Any idea how to persist the correct sort order?

Geert van Horrik
Geert van Horrik Netherlands
3/4/2009 6:34:42 PM #

I was thinking about writing a simple add-in for Visual Studio that would do this. However, when I finally find the time, VS 2010 will be released.

No, seriously, I hope to find some time soon since this bug is bothering me a lot. The only thing stopping me from developing it right now is that I hope that Microsoft will come with a solution (SP2, since VS2008 is very, very buggy when developing for WPF).

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About the Author

Geert van Horrik is a independent freelance software developer since January 1st, 2007. Since then he was been working on several projects from C++ to C# (WPF, ASP.NET, etc). Currently he loves to write his software using WPF (or Silverlight if WPF isn't an option).

Lately, Geert is spending a lot of time on Catel, a free open-source MVVM Framework for WPF and Silverlight. Actually, it's more than "just" an MVVM Framework, it's a complete application library!