When do you decide to split up large projects into smaller projects?

Question

When/where do you decide to split a large Visual Studio project into smaller multiple projects? If it can be reusable? when project is too big? (but how big is too big?)

Answer 1

I always have several projects (and therefore a solution) , instead of one project with all of my source in it.

In some cases, it is unavoidable because you are using and open source library and want to be able to debug it. But more pragmatically, I typically have my applications provide functionality via plugins. This allows me to change the behavior or offer a user-selectable behavior at runtime. In the non-plugin case, it allows you to update one portion of your program without updating everything. There are also cases where you can provide the main apparently, and only download the modules / assemblies when you need them.

One other reason is that you can create smaller test apps to exercise an assembly, rather than building a very large solution and potentially requiring a user to execute several (and irrelevant) GUI operations before even reaching the part you want to test. And this isn't just a testing concern -- maybe you have less-savvy users in your organization that only want to be presented with the bits that concern them.