How to rename Visual Studio solutions and projects

renaming.markdown

How to rename solutions and projects in Visual Studio

1. Don't.

How to rename solutions and projects that were created in Visual Studio

1. Close Visual Studio and don't open it again until I tell you. Visual Studio is not competent at renaming things.

2. Assuming you're using git, clean the working folder to remove anything that's not in version control (this will help the search-and-replace step because it won't have to go through a bunch of generated files)

   git clean -fdx

3. Rename the solution file (.sln), the project folders, and the project files (.csproj, .fsproj)

4. Open the project folder in any good text editor.

5. Search-and-replace across the whole folder and replace and text occurrences of the old name with the new name. Sublime Text and Atom have a tree view where you can right click -> Search in folder. Notepad++ has a "Find in files" option.

6. Hunt around for any weirdly mis-spelt versions of the old name that may not have been caught by the search-and-replace.

7. Specifically, look for a package.nuspec (Nuget package manifest) and check the package name in there. It should probably be the same as the solution.

8. (Finally) Open VS again and see if the project loads.

9. See if it builds.

10. Commit and push everything.

11. Don't forget to update any corresponding servcies and integrations, such as:

    • Github repositories
    • Continuous Integration configs

Update 2020-09-04

ModernRonin has written an automated tool for doing this - give it a go before trying the manual steps here, and let us know how it goes!

https://github.com/ModernRonin/ProjectRenamer

https://www.nuget.org/packages/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer/

Thank you n3dst4 . That was the only thing (among all the garbage out there) which really helped me.

Thanks, i got here through google.
Worked perfectly.

Where would you recommend actually changing the names of the folders on disk? I'm going to try doing this between steps 7 and 8.

@szalapski I have that in step 3... I haven’t found a way to automate renaming folders so I just renamed in explorer as you’d normally rename a folder.

worked like a charm. thanks!

@n3dst4 Best place to visit for renaming projects. Thank you for the steps.

You could also get rid of the old .dll files in the bin and obj folders as well. You can do this by deleting those folders and rebuilding the solution. However, having those old files sticking around won't affect anything.

Great, thanks :)

Fantastic! Thanks a lot for that, great help 😍

Thanks :)

Merci beaucoup!!!👌👍✌

Hahahaha, I really like Step 1! That's really the best part of this advice. I will now try it out...

Very useful, thx

🙏🥰

two VS Code projects (React/Git) where the business renamed the project after I started - worked like a champ! Thanks!! only additional was
git remote set-url origin [https://to-your-repo-here]

Worked great. Thanks! 🍻

Thank you!

thanks)

Thank you !

Well, the tricky part of cause here is not loosing the Github-history.
Hence I made a short demo-video on how to achive it easily:

English version: https://youtu.be/J62q-YtNkas
German version: https://youtu.be/nburYkNXGGQ

Great explanation!

Saved me (and many others as I see the comments) a lot of time and frustration.

Thanks a lot!

Thanksss!!!

Thank you. 👍

I just solved this problem for myself writing a global dotnet tool. You can see whether it works for your case, too:

https://github.com/ModernRonin/ProjectRenamer
https://www.nuget.org/packages/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer/

Cheers,
MR

Thanks @ModernRonin. I've linked your project in the gist.

👍

the tool has been updated to deal with a few more cases

the tool can now also move projects to a different directory

Amazing work 👍

It feels like msbuild has deeply coupled the names of the project and the file, which is undoubtedly a bad design.

Thanks, this worked for me :)