
If your team needs some training on the subject here's a workshop I provide. If you're working with ASP.NET Core and want to see a good solution template for new projects that follow SOLID principles and Clean Architecture, check out my Clean Architecture solution template on GitHub. And if this is a common scenario and you have too much coupling between disparate projects in your company, you can usually solve this with an internal NuGet server (which I think I'll write about next). If you make some changes that don't break your solution but cause a break for some other project that relies on a library you modified, your build server can notify you of this.

But that's what your build server is for. "But what about the benefits of one ginormous solution file?" you ask? The only real benefit is that you get immediate integration of any changes you make with all those other projects you're not actually working on right now. Just keep a local solution so you can develop in a streamlined fashion and watch your productivity and happiness increase dramatically. You don't even need to check your slimmed down version into source control if you think that'll cause problems. You don't need to use the bloated one that's checked into source control. It can have just the projects you're working on right now, or just the ones you care about. Here's the thing - you can create your own solution file. Building that solution took at least 15 minutes so you had to be very careful not to hit ctrl-shift-b unless you were ready to take a break. One company I worked with had every project the company had ever done (over 10 years and over 100 projects) in their one and only solution file.

Or they have lots of unrelated projects in them. Sometimes, solutions have more than one application in them. Most software applications involve more than one project, and so virtually every software application has a solution file organizing said projects.

Solutions are essentially groups of projects. Visual Studio has two kinds of project organization file formats: projects and solutions. NET developer you probably use or have used Visual Studio. I've given this advice quite a number of times so I figured it was time to put it into an online article.
