Visual Studio blank solution fix

[kareninstructor]

Visual Studio earlier versions provided an option to create a blank solution then in one or more updates this option has gone away. For those who are new to Visual Studio may want to create a new Visual Studio solution without any projects.

This utility provides the ability to create a blank Visual Studio solution. There are two versions, one hard coded default path to select where to create a new solution folder while the other reads the default path from a json file.

Once a new solution has been created the folder is opened in Windows Explorer, the developer can then inspect and copy the folder path to use in Visual Studio to open the new blank solution.

Written using .NET Framework 4.8 as some developers may not have moved to .NET Core yet.

Code

Clone, Fork or download code in a .zip file the following GitHub repository, build the project and run.



Open appsettings.json to set the default path for creating a new Visual Studio solution.

{
  "SolutionFolder": "C:\\OED\\Dotnetland\\VS2019",
  "About": "Provides the ability to create a new Visual Studio solution using dotnet command.\r\n\r\nIf a solution file already exist it's overwritten\r\n\r\nRoot path: C:\\OED\\Dotnetland\\VS2019\r\n\r\nBy Karen Payne\r\n"
}

[peterst]

Blank solution is available in (currently fully updated) VS2017, 2019 (including the Preview) and 2022 Preview. I remember there was update which caused it to disappear but it was for very short time as VS team fixed that.

[kareninstructor]

Blank solution is available in (currently fully updated) VS2017, 2019 (including the Preview) and 2022 Preview. I remember there was update which caused it to disappear but it was for very short time as VS team fixed that.

Just had 20 developers install VS2019 developer's edition this week, none had the blank solution.

[peterst]

Just connected to work machine with VS2019 Enterprise and there Blank solution is missing. But on all my VS Community installs (2017, 2019, 2019 Preview, 2022 Preview) the blank solution project type is there. This should be reported as someone messed the templates for different VS.NET editions.

[kareninstructor]

Just connected to work machine with VS2019 Enterprise and there Blank solution is missing. But on all my VS Community installs (2017, 2019, 2019 Preview, 2022 Preview) the blank solution project type is there. This should be reported as someone messed the templates for different VS.NET editions.

It's gotten exposure on Tweeter

Attachment 182415