- Don't.
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Close Visual Studio and don't open it again until I tell you. Visual Studio is not competent at renaming things.
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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 -
Rename the solution file (
.sln), the project folders, and the project files (.csproj,.fsproj) -
Open the project folder in any good text editor.
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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.
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Hunt around for any weirdly mis-spelt versions of the old name that may not have been caught by the search-and-replace.
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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.
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(Finally) Open VS again and see if the project loads.
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See if it builds.
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Commit and push everything.
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Don't forget to update any corresponding servcies and integrations, such as:
- Github repositories
- Continuous Integration configs
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!
the tool has been updated to deal with a few more cases