Should a .sln be committed to source control?

Question

Is it a best practice to commit a .sln file to source control? When is it appropriate or inappropriate to do so?

Update There were several good poin

Answer 1

You should definitely have it. Beside the reasons other people mentioned, it's needed to make one step build of the whole projects possible.

Answer 2

We usually put all of our solutions files in a solutions directory. This way we separate the solution from the code a little bit, and it's easier to pick out the project I need to work on.

Answer 3

We do because it keeps everything in sync. All the necessary projects are located together, and no one has to worry about missing one. Our build server (Ant Hill Pro) also uses the sln to figure which projects to build for a release.

Answer 4

I generally agree that solution files should be checked in, however, at the company I work for we have done something different. We have a fairly large repository and developers work on different parts of the system from time to time. To support the way we work we would either have one big solution file or several smaller. Both of these have a few shortcomings and require manual work on the developers part. To avoid this, we have made a plug-in that handles all that.

The plug-in let each developer check out a subset of the source tree to work on simply by selecting the relevant projects from the repository. The plugin then generates a solution file and modifies project files on the fly for the given solution. It also handles references. In other words, all the developer has to do is to select the appropriate projects and then the necessary files are generated/modified. This also allows us to customize various other settings to ensure company standards.

Additionally we use the plug-in to support various check-in policies, which generally prevents users from submitting faulty/non-compliant code to the repository.

Answer 5

Yes, things you should commit are:

• solution (*.sln),
• project files,
• all source files,
• app config files
• build scripts

Things you should not commit are:

• solution user options (.suo) files,
• build generated files (e.g. using a build script) [Edit:] - only if all necessary build scripts and tools are available under version control (to ensure builds are authentic in cvs history)

Regarding other automatically generated files, there is a separate thread.

Answer 6

.slns are the only thing we haven't had problems with in tfs!