That's fair (re: 64-bit) and I'll amend: VS2015 should be able to handle a solution with (say) 1,000 projects without crashing. If that can be done in 32 bits, hurrah.

its not that uncommon to find VS solution files consisting of 100+ projects, especially in finance. The most I've worked on was 132 projects in a single solution (roughly a third were test projects). It was slow and sluggish at times but still workable nevertheless...

Wow, I'm impressed! What do you work on where 1,000 projects in a solution is a thing? With just one developer per five projects you've got a team of 200 developers. What are you working on? Please give us a few details.

I'm working on a legacy desktop app (~25 years), currently around 600 projects. Maybe one developer per 7 projects. Common workflow is to create custom solutions around your working set of projects, but that's not ideal for whole code analysis/debugging.

Have you guys heard of "libraries"? Having that much source code open at once when I bet 90% rarely needs to be analyzed/parsed is insane.

It always amazes me how someone can say "x sucks" and never question their own insane workflow.

Does that mean that there's a lot of duplicate projects? It seems like there's an opportunity for consolidation. I've seen a few solutions where a developer created a Project for every class library and then only ever referenced them from 1 other Project. I was able to roll up a 30+ project solution into 5.

this seems like a nightmare.

why couldn't you break it out into separate solutions and reference versioned dll's?

We had ~150 projects across about 1M LOC and 4 developers because they were being used like folders - they weren't really separate codebases, just a means of organising the code. We cut that down for a drastic improvement in speed.

> In comparison to other IDEs it is superb.

I thought most serious users of VS had to install ReSharper on top of it?

Most "serious" users are now uninstalling ReSharper. Visual Studio 2015 adds most of ReSharper's key perks and JetBrains has done little or nothing to resolve ReSharper's laggy/hoggy/unstable code (and has said they aren't going to re-write it for Roslyn).

Honestly back in VS 2010 I'd call ReSharper a core tool. In VS 2015, eww.

Thanks, appreciated. I honestly thought it still was like this.

I've never liked ReSharper, have felt that the "advice" it offers is often over-rated and seems commonly to be wrong for C# (not unexpected given that JetBrains primarily focuses on Java outside of ReSharper, I feel like ReSharper is a Java developer's approach to C#). These days what's baked into VS and the Roslyn compiler platform blows ReSharper out of the water.

Just about everyone I've worked with that had daily complaints about how slow and laggy they felt Visual Studio was didn't seem to understand that ReSharper was 99% of the slow-down, excessive memory use, and UX lag...

I never liked it either, but I've worked in places where it was like the eleventh commandment and you better not say anything against it! :) I'm glad to hear it's loosing popularity.

I guess I'm not a serious user then because I've never used ReSharper anywhere I've worked.